Meeting Him: : Answering the Simple Questions of Children

The questions of children--simple and sublime, brilliantly innocent and innocently brilliant--await Pope John Paul II at a little parochial school near downtown Los Angeles.

If you were God (one of the students at Immaculate Conception School wants to know) what would you do first?

Are you ever lonely or afraid? another wonders.

Do you get tired of your job?

Why did you forgive the person who shot you?

And, inevitably: What is your favorite sport?

These questions and bushels more like them are the result of perhaps the most remarkable homework assignment ever handed out to parochial schoolchildren in this land. Last week, on only their second day back from summer vacation, pupils in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades at Immaculate Conception School were asked to prepare questions that they would like to put to the Pope.

What made the assignment so remarkable was that it was founded wholly in the actual. Wednesday afternoon, nine of the best inquisitors, along with a dozen other pupils selected in a lottery, will be allowed to converse with the Pope himself.

John Paul will arrive by helicopter at the humble, stucco two-story schoolhouse, an entrance that might well thrill some of the pupils as much as anything else that happens during the day. The Pope will walk to an archway outside the school and greet a lady--more specifically, the First Lady, Nancy Reagan. She will have come by mere limousine.

Together, these two will climb the steps to Room 7, take their seats and begin a conference with the 21 chosen students. It is one of the few meetings during the Pope’s 10-day swing through America in which the participants have not been required to submit advance texts. Thus, the wisdom of Art Linkletter--kids really do say the darndest things--might well apply.

“For us,” said Principal Mary Ann Murphy, “it will be wide open.

“Total spontaneity.”

The conversation is scheduled to last at least 20 minutes, at which point the Pope and the First Lady will descend to the blacktop playground and briefly address the remaining student body. And then they will be gone, the Pope in his helicopter, the First Lady in her limo.

The will depart with gifts--flowers for the Holy Father, a scroll of anti-drug pledges for Nancy Reagan. And, Murphy said, it is hoped that the Pope also “will take with him an understanding of what kids are like in this country.”

Murphy is a newcomer to Immaculate Conception. She accepted the principal job late last school year, shortly before it was confirmed that John Paul would visit during his two days in Los Angeles. “An eye-opener” is how the 33-year-old educator describes the news.

Enrollment did not swell after the announcement. The school already is bulging with children, most of whom are Latino and all of whom seemed especially well-scrubbed last week in their matching uniforms of blue shirts and corduroy for the boys, red plaid jumpers and black-and-white saddle shoes for the girls. Not a single untucked shirt could be found, not a single shoelace untied. This was the day before the selection process was to begin.

As principal, Murphy faced the hard duty of picking from among 320 students the 21 who would meet with the Pope and First Lady. She is proud of her solution: All sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders who submitted questions, along with a paragraph espousing their candidacy, had their names placed in a lottery. From this pool, four were selected from each class at random. Three more were chosen from each class based on how well they completed the homework assignment.

The lower grades were left out because it was thought that the older children would more easily converse with the Pope. However, in a nice piece of preventive diplomacy, Murphy declared that one student from each lower grade would help present gifts to the visitors.

The school is well-scrubbed and freshly painted. Murphy noticed that students have taken pains not to smudge the walls with playground-soiled hands. Fans have been installed in Room 7, a concession to the heat of television klieg lights needed to illuminate the meeting for the small crew of media that will record the event.

A picture of the pontiff has been hung in each classroom, and each grade has decorated its room with greetings. “You’re the Good Shepherd,” the first-graders have written, “and we’re the Sheep.”

By and large, however, the 70-year-old school will be presented as is.

“We wanted the school to look like a school,” Murphy said.

As for the students, they are being drilled to overcome their awe and speak right up. “They tend to be shy,” Murphy said. The archbishop will play the role of Pope in rehearsals. Similarly, visiting reporters have been brought before the classrooms to interview the students and, in the process, provide training in the oddities of adult conversation.

“Now don’t shy out on me,” Murphy instructed one class last week as the students balked at responding to a reporter’s questions. “We’ve talked about that.”

In this instance, there were explanations for the muteness other than shyness: The reporter was one in a succession to troop into class that day, asking questions, questions, questions; and, more likely, the recess bell had just rung. As soon as this last pencil-pusher could be sent out the door, the students knew, they could go outside and play. Even the Pope could forgive that impulse.