From the Publisher Our Papal Audience

The tickets were waiting for us when we arrived in Rome late on a Tuesday night, along with a note from our friend telling us to be at a certain gate in St. Peter’s Square at a certain time, Be early- thousands of people were expected for the Pope’s first outdoor audience of the spring. Following instructions, we presented our tickets to the Italian soldier standing at the gate with a submachine gun slung over his shoulder. From all the side-streets, people were flowing into the square. At the end of the aisle, we met a blue-uniformed Swiss guard with a pistol. He motioned us up another long aisle toward the front. At the end of that aisle we were met by a Michelangelo-spangled Swiss guard with the traditional pike. He looked at our tickets, handed them back, and snapped to attention. This was unexpected, as was the papal chamberlain who suddenly appeared behind him, in swallow tails and

draped with a large gold medallion. He stood on the first step that leads to the altar in front of St. Peter’s and peered down at us. “La famiglia de la Tejas?” he asked. We looked about us to see if he was talking to somebody else, then nodded. With that, my wife and I and two daughters were ushered up the steps and escorted to a row of seats to the side of the altar, facing the great red canopy and the throne.

Below us thousands were filing to their seats. Around us clerics, TV crews, and security were bustling in preparation. To our right and our left, the papal chamberlains were escorting ambassadors, princes, and assorted other dignitaries, ribboned and bemedaled, to their seats.

I don’t have the space to go into detail about the ceremony itself. After it was over, while the cheers were subsiding, the papal chamberlain suddenly appeared again. “La famiglia de la Tejas,” he said, this time more as an announcement than a question. Again we nodded. He motioned us to follow him. which we did, coming to a knot of people. A cardinal in his red robes emerged from the small throng, which parted as the chamberlain stepped aside and the cardinal announced, “La mama de la famiglia de Tejas” to the Holy Father.

And so it was that Christine Allison was presented to Pope John Paul II.

To the thousands who’ve read her many books she is an author. To the people in the Vatican who surreptitiously arranged our seating and our introduction she is the newest papal biographer. But to this man, she bears a claim beside which her other accomplishments fade, and for that reason she was presented to him as-a mother.

John Paul II is widely regarded as the greatest man of our time, one of the greatest of the century, and one of the great popes in history. So at the end of the century as we question what greatness is and how it emerges and what its qualities are, who better than this great man to turn to for an answer? I saw him give the answer that day.

Beyond all the pomp, beyond the cheering, with a direct gaze that put everyone else and everything else aside, as his hand reached out to Christine, he reached out to motherhood, to the heart of existence itself, and taking it in his grasp, drew it close to him, and in such a small way said again what he has said in so many large ways to so many people across the planet-that the answer is love.