From the time I began to study café life I have been impressed with the links to religion.  This was first apparent when my graduate advisor, an Irish Catholic from New York, pressed me to write an article (alas it is still not written) comparing the iconography of the Catholic Church and its rituals to that of a bar.  He saw many affinities between the stained glass, statues, and inscriptions and the mirrors, multicolored bottles, and sayings to be found in bars.   

The death and funeral of Pope John Paul II has turned my thinking back to such issues.  Clearly since the dawn of television few events have been covered in greater detail than those that have unfolded at Rome over the past two weeks.  What made this Pope so special in the lives of millions around the world? 

I believe the answer lies in Pope John Paul II’s adeptness at sociability and hospitality. Naturally, his pontificate was controversial because of his traditionalism on many matters.  Nevertheless, his life trajectory from working in factories before World War II, to fighting Nazism, and then Communism, made him keenly aware of the desperation and alienation of modern life.  These were not just concepts that he read or reflected upon but active threats that could have erased his life and his faith if he had let them.  During World War II he put his life on the line to thwart the Nazi attempt to create the ideal of a “pure Aryan” community by saving Jews and protecting their cultural integrity and then, in his first years as Pope, he would provide an answer to Stalin’s cynical question asked at the end of World War II: “how many divisions does the pope have?”

His travels to Poland in 1979 and to Chile in 1987 were perhaps the most historically momentous events of his papacy.  Before assembled millions in both nations John Paul II created one of the ultimate spaces of sociability and hospitality where two nations were refounded not merely in aspiration but in concrete social interaction.  Because the effects of his visit to Chile are less well known, let us look at them in some detail.  As one of Pope John Paul II’s biographers has noted of his visit to Chile: “The great theme for the visit would be that “Chile’s vocation is for understanding, not confrontation.” The papal pilgrimage would, as one of its organizers put it to me, "take back the streets,” which had been places of fear under Allende and Pinochet, and transform them, once again, into places of community. And people would be deliberately mixed together at the venues for the papal Masses: Chileans would be compelled, under the eye of their common religious "father,” to look at each other, once again, as persons rather than ideological objects. And it seems no accident that, some eighteen months after the papal visit had accelerated the process of reconstructing Chilean civil society, a national plebiscite voted to move beyond military rule and restore democracy.” 

Pope John Paul II, in short, was genius at synthesizing both the oldest and the news social media.   He had an uncanny ability to transform his personal charisma that shone so brightly in face-to-face encounters onto a world stage via the modern media of television and then the Internet.  Indeed, he greatly appreciated the power of the Internet and made sure the Vatican was fully connected to its international flock.   

The epitome of Pope John Paul II’s sociable instincts came when he displayed his suffering and dying to the world.   Unleashing a flood of empathy John Paul II confirmed that insights of social thinkers as far back at Jean Jacques Rousseau the suffering often is a catalyst in the creation or sustaining of community.  As a consequence of the millions of pilgrims who came to his funeral Rome became the site of the largest funeral in modern history and thus of necessity the most hospitable and sociable of cities. 

The fact that leaders and pilgrims of virtually every faith journeyed to Rome shows that his message and life transcended strict denominational boundaries in particular and religion in general.  Amidst our cell phones, personal computers, and walkmans, humans again were shown to be the social animals that Aristotle believed. 

Thus the death of Pope John Paul II provides yet one more reason why café society must be developed and sustained across the world.  It is very much part of the spirit of the time in which we live that recently in San Jose California Catholic priests have gone into local pubs to preach.  In going where the people are these priests follow in the footsteps of John Paul II and of course Jesus, who socialized with “publicans and sinners” (though of course in his age a publican was a tax collector rather than a bar keeper) and held his last supper in an inn. 

I hope that this essay would have made my graduate mentor proud by showing affinities that can exist between different types of sociability.  Certainly John Paul II knew, as do all truly religious people, that holiness must be created not simply assumed.  This was the message of William Blake in the following lines from poem "The Little Vagabond:” 

            Dear mother, dear mother, the church is cold

            But the ale-house is healthy and pleasant and warm.