When the Pope Came to Philadelphia

On October 4, 1979, Pope John Paul II made his first ever visit to Philadelphia. He was going to say an outdoor Mass for a million people at noon on Logan Square, in the city.
And that morning I got fired from my job.

I was in my mid-20s and had never been fired before, and I was ashamed, humiliated, angry, and confused. My boss smiled and said I didn’t have to leave right away. “I like you,” he said, “and I don’t want to kick you out, just because you can’t handle this job. I’m going to let you stay on board for a month, while you look for another job.”

I wanted to strangle him. We worked at a magazine in the heart of the city, and I was the promotion director, the man who was supposed to come up with ideas for promoting the magazine to our advertisers. I hadn’t handled the details of the job very well, but I’d also been constantly undercut by some of the salespeople, who liked the old promotion director and didn’t like this young upstart who’d replaced her.

It wasn’t all my fault, but that was cold comfort. I felt like a failure when I left the boss’s office, and I didn’t know how I’d face my father.

My Dad worked across the river in Camden, New Jersey, and he was taking the train over to meet me at 11:30, after which we were going to walk to Logan Square to see the Pope’s Mass. He was proud that I had gotten this job at a respected, successful magazine, and that I seemed to be doing so well at it.

I wandered around my office in a daze for an hour, accepting the sympathy of co-workers who’d heard what had happened, and then saw it was time to go meet my Dad. I rode the elevator downstairs, grateful for the chance to get away from this place of shame, but dreading the meeting with my father.

Outside the sun was shining brilliantly, and the air had an early Autumn crispness. People were hurrying along the streets, busy with their goals and dreams, while I felt deflated, like my life suddenly had no direction.

I walked two blocks to the entrance to the subway station where I was supposed to meet my Dad, then down the stairs to the underground platform, where hordes of people were just getting out of a train. In the mass of faces I saw my Dad, and I tried to put on a smile for him. As we hurried along the streets to Logan Square I tried to talk about everything and anything except my job. I kept the conversation going all the way till we got to the Square, and we took our places with the throngs of people waiting for the Pope.
I don’t remember very much about the Mass, because we were so far from the altar that the Pope was simply a distant figure in white. We could hear his voice over the loudspeakers, but some of his homily was lost to me because of his heavy Polish accent. I do remember a feeling of elation, though, at being outside on such a brilliant day with so many people listening to the words of this holy man. It gave me a feeling that everything would be all right, that the world wasn’t going to end because I lost my job.
After the Mass, as we walked back to the subway, I told my Dad that I’d gotten fired. “It’s okay,” I heard myself saying. “I wanted to be a writer anyway, and this will give me the chance to pursue that dream. I know the editor at the magazine, and he said he’d give me some freelance assignments.” This was true, although I had never before thought seriously about writing for the magazine.

Until then.

As it turned out, I wrote several freelance stories for the magazine, and those stories helped me to get other assignments from other editors. Within six months I had a healthy freelance writing career.

There was another benefit that came out of that day. The first major magazine article that an editor accepted from me came the following April. I went out with some friends to celebrate, and that night I met the woman who later became my wife, and the mother of my children.

All of this happened because I got fired the day the Pope came to Philadelphia. I’ve thought about this many times since then. Although I didn’t have a life-changing spiritual experience at that outdoor Mass, the seeds of some major changes in my life were planted that day. Somehow I feel that the Pope’s visit started it all, that there were changes in the spiritual realm that day that sent my life in another direction.

I think about it every year in October, especially on brilliant, sunny days.