Providence in Paris

by Jack Cashill

 

For me to have ended up where I did when I did on the evening of April 19—and subsequently to learn what I did—had to have been at least a wee bit providential.

That morning, I had arrived in Paris for a conference the next day. I got to my hotel in the Mont-parnasse district sometime after noon, took a nap, and awoke feeling at least semi-human. With no plans for the day, I decided to take the Metro to the Notre Dame Cathedral. But alas, I took the wrong train (I was misinformed! Those French!) and found myself heading toward the Eiffel Tower.

I got off one stop past the Tower at the Trocadero and decided to check out the wonderfully presumptuous Musee de L’Homme—the Museum of Man—there to learn nothing less than “ses origines, les singularités de l’espèce humaine, une histoire culturelle de l’humanité.”

Unfortunately, it was Tuesday. And for reasons apparent to no one but the French, all the museums in the entire country were closed. I would have to wait until Wednesday to get the inside dope on the origins and singularities of our misbegotten species.

The sun having popped through, I bought a five dollar coffee—about one tablespoon’s worth—and hung out for a while on a park bench in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. There are, as you might imagine, worse ways to spend a Tuesday afternoon in April.

By the time clouds rolled back in, I had long since consumed my Lilliputian latté—oh, for a QuikTrip!—and decided to complete my journey to Notre Dame. I was planning to take a cab when I saw a boat on the Seine in the process of loading passengers. Just as I was buying my ticket, however, the boat pulled away. When I chose not to complete the transaction, the ticket seller grew slightly hysterical, not knowing how to undo it.

Rather than aggravate the post-Iraqi War tensions, I chose to buy the ticket. These tensions are, to be sure, pretty close to the surface. After this first day, I spent the rest of my sojourn in full immersion in French households. Partly out of politeness and partly out of humility, my French friends would inevitably begin their exploration of things American with the caveat, “We are told.”

“We are told that the President is an idiot.” “We are told that the American media were all for the war in Iraq.” “We are told that Americans are politically naïve and very fat.” As to who was doing the telling, that was the largely government-controlled broadcast media and the inevitable Michael Moore, who, everyone assured me, was highly popular in France.

Rather than argue with my hosts, I admitted that, yes, Americans were kind of fat—just look at Michael Moore—but I assured them that if they had all-you-can-eat salad bars and free parking they would be fat too. As to Saddam, I had to apologize—the nerve of us depriving the French defense industry of its best customer! The media there are so tightly controlled that the latter revelation, entirely true, came as a complete surprise.

Although the ticket seller had assured me that the next boat would be by in 10 minutes, it was a full 30 minutes or so before the next one came. Again, there are many less-pleasant pastimes than an early-April evening boat ride down the Seine, even if I were just about the only person on the boat not conspicuously on his or her honeymoon.

It was about 6 p.m.—three or so hours behind schedule—when I disembarked at Notre Dame and climbed the stairs to the square in front of the Cathedral. For all its grandeur, Notre Dame in Paris is something of a mixed blessing. The Cathedral’s central location makes it a much-too-obvious attraction. Sightseers—boatloads of them, literally—tour this classic edifice with about as much reverence as they would, say, the Steamboat Arabia or Silver Dollar City.

This day was a little different. As I entered, I could see that the large center section of the Cathedral, reserved for worshippers, was actually full. The tourists circulated around the perimeter as usual, but they were distracted by the frequent TV screens that were tuned to the news.

At first glance, the presence of the TVs seemed disrespectful, if not downright sacrilegious.

But it all began to make sense just a minute or so after I arrived when the image of the newscaster yielded to that of the Vatican balcony.

I made my way toward the front and watched events unfold on a large screen in the middle, the one on which the worshippers were focused. A cardinal was speaking. He announced that a new Pope indeed had been chosen. The new Pope was none other than the former Cardinal Josef Ratzinger—now to be known, in French at least, as Benoit XVI.

Almost to a person, the worshippers leaped to their feet and started applauding. It was all very moving, this whole vast ancient Cathedral animated by the same spirit that inspired its creation nearly a millennium ago. And I was there to see it!

I must admit, though, that my motives for cheering may not have been as pure as those of my fellow enthusiasts. Six years earlier, I had made a documentary about Catholic tradition shot entirely in Rome and starring none other than Cardinal Ratzinger. In easily the most cosmopolitan moment of my career, I had interviewed the good Cardinal one on one, and in French no less.

I knew the Pope! I had talked to him. Heck, I don’t even know my state representative. As a bragging point, I figured, this would even surpass having sat at a table next to Brad Pitt in a Santa Monica restaurant just a month earlier. Was I cool or what? I bet even Brad Pitt hasn’t met the Pope.

Not everyone, however, was as pleased as I was. On the announcement of Cardinal Ratzinger’s ascendancy, the squat, surly woman standing next to me began to boo as if she were at a WWE Smackdown and the Pope were Johnny Nitro. That no one joined her did not stop her.

“Boooooo! Women are ruined,” she said in much too obvious American. “In the states, we call him Ratzi the Nazi. Booooooo!”

“In the states of confusion and hor-monal imbalance,” I might have re-joined, but this did not seem a good time or place to mix it up with such an All-American harridan. Besides, I felt sorry for her presumed husband, a bearded, academic-looking sort, who stood by sheepishly while his wife raved. Still, after some additional hectoring by this lady, he seemed compelled to join her irritated army of one. “It is a sad day for humanity,” he pitched in shyly.

Right.

By the time I left the Cathedral, several French news crews had arrived in the square out front and were interviewing the faithful to get their reaction. One crew even questioned me. “Cardinal Ratzinger is a good choice,” I said in my functional, if uninspired, French. When asked why, I answered that the new Pope understood the Church and its traditions. When I said this, the producer just rolled his eyes and looked for someone else to talk to.

That night I watched the coverage of the Papal announcement on French TV. In the square outside Notre Dame, the viewer was treated to one saddened French Catholic after another sharing their great “disappointment.” Somehow, the throngs of the excited faithful seemed to have slipped by the camera crews unnoticed. The French word for disappointment, by the way, seemed altogether appropriate for the media’s performance. That word is déception.

Not able to depend on their own media for the truth, the French once again will have to rely on ours. It’s just a matter of time, one suspects, before Michael Moore gets to work on “Ratzi the Nazi,” the inside story of how the Vatican plotted with Charlton Heston and the Mossad to deny black Cardinals their hanging chads and steal the Papal election from Al Gore.

It should go quite swimmingly at Cannes.

 

Jack Cashill is Ingram’s Executive Editor and has affiliated with the magazine for 26 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram’s Magazine.