Thousands throng to Vatican to celebrate start of Holy Year

Thousands throng to Vatican to celebrate start of Holy Year
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

VATICAN CITY, DEC 25: Nervous excitement gave way to deeply felt emotion and pride among the faithful as Pope John Paul II rang in the Holy Year on Christmas Eve opening the Holy Door at Saint Peter's Basilica.

"Hi, I'm at the Holy Door. This is incredible. You must see it to believe it," said Noelle, a Vatican painter, on her cellular phone before all portables were ordered turned off meters (yards) from the door. As the door slowly opened after three knocks by Pope John Paul II in deep silence, the emotion among the thousands attending the three-hour ceremony was almost palpable. "This is so beautiful," said a visibly impressed young volunteer as the open door allowed a glimpse of the splendor inside the basilica and the pope, alone, was kneeling on its threshold.

Thousands of earnest faces in Saint Peter's Square betrayed the immense concentration of those watching the ceremony on this cold winter night on giant screens. Many families attended the first act of the Vatican's Jubilee 2000 celebration, and many came with their children. But among the tens of thousands there were also lovers enjoying a rare moment.

Few had made the journey to Saint Peter's Square alone. "You have just left the basilica? May I have your ticket?" a souvenir-hunting Italian nun asked one of the few journalists allowed to attend the Holy Door opening close by. A woman clad in an elegantly rich fur coat pleaded with a policeman to let her go beyond the barriers to one of the many seats in the square. William Bruno, a member of the US Army from Texas, said he was attending the festivities with his wife and two children "because this only happens once in a lifetime."

A group of 240 Indonesians from Jakarta was baffled by the illuminated basilica which shone in the night after it was blasted clean in a thorough restoration of its facade. One of them, Gabriel Subiyanto, wanted to enter the basilica through the Holy Door before Sunday because he would then be headed for the Holy Land. The faithful gathered in Saint Peter's Square for this once-in-a-lifetime event on the eve of the third millennium all radiated the same pride at being Catholics, close to the pope at the start of the Holy Year and part of a huge community of pilgrims.

But while Catholics were celebrating the 2000th birthday of Christ, secular, anticlericalist Romans and those rejecting the Vatican's pervasive influence in city and state affairs went back on a pledge to meet at one of their city's rare secular monuments the statue of Giordano Bruno, a 16th-century philosopher. Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition at Rome's Campo de' Fiori and has long been a symbol of intransigence in the face of religious oppression. But no one turned up late Friday at the square, which is popular with Romans and tourists alike for its medieval charm, as it has become one of the many casualties of slow construction work in Rome in the runup to the millennium. On Christmas Eve part of its new cobble-stone pavement was still unfinished and Bruno's statue in the middle of the square out of reach of would-be demonstrators as wire mesh was put up along houses leaving only a narrow path across to the French embassy nearby.