Where popes have gone first: Destinations are meaningful

Pope Paul VI inaugurated apostolic trips by airplane in 1964: He traveled to the Holy Land; a more significant choice couldn't have been possible.

Ever since, the first trip a pope makes seems to carry a weight beyond the geographical stops. It's seen almost as a symbol of the pontificate.

While John XXIII had made two journeys by train to Assisi and Loreto, Paul VI was the first pope to take an airplane, heading toward a destination of immense symbolic weight: the Holy Land.

Beginning to consider this trip shortly after his election in June 1963, Paul VI noted in his personal writings that he wished this “pilgrimage to be very quick, to have a character of simplicity, piety, penance, and charity.”

In reality, when he made his trip official on December 4, 1963, before the Council Fathers who had just completed the second session of Vatican II, he opened a new chapter in the presence of the papacy on the global stage.

One month later, when the Pope flew to the Holy Land for three days, from January 4 to 6, 1964, he found himself — despite his intentions — at the center of immense international attention. Sign of the times: the French weekly Paris Match chartered an entire airplane to send its teams.

The trip unfolded first in the holy places then located in Jordanian territory: Amman, the Jordan River, Bethany, the Holy Sepulcher, Gethsemane. King Hussein thus became the first world leader to receive a pope in this media era that foreshadowed globalization.

The second part of the voyage was trickier, since the Holy See had not yet formally recognized the State of Israel; relations would not be established until nearly 30 years later, in December 1993. The stages of Paul VI’s visit to biblical sites in Israeli territory (Nazareth, Cana, Tabgha, Capernaum, Mount of the Beatitudes, Mount Tabor, the Cenacle, Bethlehem) took place with a certain tension, with security forces overwhelmed by the unexpected crowds.

In meeting Israeli President Zalman Shazar, Paul VI vigorously defended Pius XII, recently being accused by some currents of public opinion of not having acted against the Shoah.

“People have wanted to cast suspicion and even accusations against this great pontiff,” he said, stressing that there is “nothing more unjust than this attack on so venerable a memory.”

But the two moments of his trip that would mark Paul VI the most were the Mass he celebrated at the Holy Sepulcher — where he confessed he was “gripped by emotion and tears” — and his historic meeting with the Patriarch of Constantinople, Athenagoras, after more than 900 years of anathemas between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

“We must understand one another, we must make peace, show the world that we have become brothers again,” the Patriarch told the Pope — words that Paul VI reported to the cardinals upon his return to Rome.

This request would lead, one year later, to the lifting of the reciprocal excommunications between Rome and Constantinople.

A few weeks after his election, the new Pope John Paul II announced his intention to resume the tradition of apostolic journeys, which had been interrupted for nine years. The last international trip of a pope went back to Paul VI’s long tour in Asia and Oceania, from December 26 to December 5, 1970. Exhausted by that long trip — which took him to Australia, Samoa, and even Hong Kong — Paul VI had not left Italy afterward. As for John Paul I, his very brief pontificate gave him no time to travel.

Contrary to some predictions, John Paul II’s first trip was not to his native Poland, but to Latin America, from January 25 to February 1, 1979. Concerned about the distortions of liberation theology, the Polish pontiff wanted to attend the 3rd General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate in Puebla, following the earlier meetings in Rio de Janeiro (1955) and Medellín (1968), which had given momentum to the Latin American Catholic preferential option for the poor.

Coming from a communist country, John Paul II was worried about Marxist tendencies observed in some local Churches of Latin America, with whom relations would be difficult throughout his pontificate. In his Puebla address, he denounced “erroneous interpretations” of the Church’s social doctrine, pointing to the need for “timely critique” and “serene discernment.” He thus opened a more restrictive phase regarding certain experiments underway in Latin America.

But the trip was also an opportunity for John Paul II to visit several Mexican cities, where he met with immense success, greeted by a total of 18 million exuberant people. He would go on to visit Mexico another four times and the typical cheer: "Juan Pablo, hermano, ya eres Mexicano" (John Paul, our brother, you're already Mexican) was a hallmark of how thoroughly the country embraced and loved him.

Paradoxically, in 1979, this country — marked by deep popular piety but also by the Cristero War that had ended only 50 years earlier — still had no formal relations with the Holy See and enforced a strict secularism; priests were often required to dress as laymen outside liturgical settings. It was the only Latin American country without Vatican relations.

A sign of this distance: the New York Times article on the trip highlighted concern about maintaining Mexico's separation of Church and state, and offered a sad conclusion meant to be tongue-in-cheek: "John Paul's violations of the Constitution — wearing his robes in public and, being a foreigner, saying mass —will be ignored."

Yet the trip helped to relaunch institutional dialogue, which would lead, in 1992, to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Mexico and Rome — one of whose architects was a then-little-known prelate: Monsignor Pietro Parolin, the future Secretary of State under Popes Francis and Leo XIV.

John Paul II’s first trip abroad also included two stopovers: in Santo Domingo on the outbound journey and the Bahamas on the return. His first country visited was therefore formally the Dominican Republic, which he would visit again 13 years later for the 4th Conference of the Latin American Episcopate.

Elected in April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger knew that his first trip, from August 18 to 21, would take him to his native Germany. World Youth Day had been scheduled for summer 2005 in Cologne, whose cathedral holds, according to tradition, the relics of the Magi. This symbolism was central to the WYD theme: “We have come to worship him” (Mt 2:2).

The German pope had a special connection to this city, having served during Vatican II as theological adviser to Cardinal Josef Frings, Archbishop of Cologne, for more than 25 years and a key figure in Germany’s postwar moral and material reconstruction.

During the early weeks of his pontificate, Benedict XVI’s reputation as a discreet intellectual caused some to doubt how well he'd pull off a WYD, but the new pope had little difficulty following the program originally intended for John Paul II. He added two emphases of his own: silence — observed with impressive reverence by nearly a million young people in prayer in Marienfeld — and the ecumenical and interreligious dimension.

One highlight of his trip was his visit to the Cologne synagogue on August 19. This tribute to the Jewish community, 60 years after the end of Nazism, made by a German pope personally marked by that period, received intense media attention.

In North Rhine–Westphalia, a region marked by wide confessional diversity, many Protestants also took part in making the event a success. Many WYD participants were shaken by the news of the murder of Brother Roger, founder of the Taizé Community, killed in his church in the presence of young pilgrims en route to Cologne.

On the political level, this trip was one of the rare papal journeys taking place during an election campaign — something the Holy See usually seeks to avoid. Five weeks before the Bundestag elections, Benedict XVI met both the outgoing Social Democratic chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his Christian Democratic opponent Angela Merkel, who would succeed him that autumn.

Benedict XVI would return to Germany twice as pope: in September 2006 to his native Bavaria, and in September 2011 to Berlin and Erfurt, in the land of Martin Luther. He also returned to Germany privately in June 2020, as pope emeritus, to visit his dying brother.

The first Latin American pope in history, elected on March 13, 2013, traveled to Latin America for his first trip, from July 22 to 28, also for World Youth Day. As in the case of Benedict XVI, the Rio de Janeiro event had already been scheduled.

Despite the traditional rivalry between Brazil and Argentina, Francis was warmly welcomed in the Portuguese-speaking giant. In her welcome address, President Dilma Rousseff joked that “the pope may be Argentinian, but God is Brazilian.”

This visit allowed Pope Francis to return to Aparecida, the Marian shrine where, as Cardinal Bergoglio, he had played a central role during the meeting of the Latin American bishops six years earlier. The then-Archbishop of Buenos Aires, as general rapporteur of the final document, impressed his Latin American peers with his ability to synthesize, and his concern for a Church more committed to social issues.

Back in Rio for WYD events, Pope Francis visited the Varginha favela, where he spontaneously prayed the Our Father with an evangelical pastor, opening the door to a form of ecumenism still uncommon for that place and time.

On Thursday evening, July 25, the Pope took part in the welcoming vigil on Copacabana Beach — which hosted the entire set of events — where attendance reached four million people for the final Mass on July 28. In his final homily, the Pope invited young people to “become disciples of Christ” and to bear witness to the love of God by serving others and overcoming our selfishness.

This massive gathering, which also served as a logistical test for Brazil ahead of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, remains a great popular success. It allowed Pope Francis to establish the informal style that would earn him lasting popularity among the young. Many who first encountered him in Rio would meet him again at the following WYDs: Krakow (2016), Panama City (2019), and Lisbon (2023).