Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Prince Rainier III and Grace Kelly in the Throne Room of the royal palace in April 1956.
April 20, 1956 photo from files of Prince Rainier III of Monaco after his marriage to Hollywood actress Grace Kelly, right, in Monte Carlo. Prince Rainier of Monaco, Europe's longest-serving monarch has died aged 81, Wednesday April 6, 2005. Monaco's royal palace made the announcement Wednesday morning. The Prince has been in intensive care since March 22 with heart, kidney and breathing problems. (AP Photo/PA, fls)
Viewed 1 time Prince Rainier III of Monaco died today in a Monaco hospital. He was 81.
Monaco, in Mourning, All but Shuts Down After Its Prince Dies
By CRAIG S. SMITH
MONACO, April 6 - This notorious playboys' paradise and tax haven slowed to a near halt today to mourn the death of its sovereign, Prince Rainier III, Europe's longest reigning monarch whose marriage to the American film star Grace Kelly captivated romantics around the world.
The prince, who ruled this tiny principality for 55 years, "passed away peacefully" at 6:35 a.m. local time in Monaco's Cardio-Thoracic Medical Center, according to Monaco's Archbishop Bernard Barsi.
Since March 7, the 81-year-old prince had lain in the hospital, suffering from progressive heart and kidney failure and hooked up to a respirator. His only son, Albert, 47, was at his side when he died and automatically succeeded him, in accordance with longstanding tradition.
Church bells brought the news to the principality's residents, which officially number 33,000, though only about 25,000 live here full time. The archbishop, speaking to reporters later in the day, said that Prince Rainier's body had been moved to a private chapel in the palace for a few days before it is carried to the town's 19th century cathedral for the lying in state.
The prince will be interred in the royal crypt beside his wife. Princess Grace died in a car crash on a hill above the town 23 years ago.
The funeral is set for April 15 and " It will be a simple funeral in accordance with the prince's wishes, similar to the one for Princess Grace," the archbishop said.
Along the small port, workers continued hammering together huge viewing stands for next month's annual Monaco Grand Prix, but few of the harborside restaurants remained open. The renowned Monte Carlo casino was also closed. And on the "rock" overlooking it all, the royal flag was already flying at half-mast from the palace's clock tower, in honor of Pope John Paul II.
The principality's television and radio stations interrupted normal broadcasts to air tributes to the prince. Residents gathered silently in the square outside the palace as black limousines bearing friends and family members swept through the gates.
President Jacques Chirac of France issued a statement calling Prince Rainier "a figure who was universally respected and much loved." The prince had a sometimes-strained relationship with his French protectors, resisting France's attempts in the 1960's to force it to amend its generous tax laws.
France has yet to ratify changes to its treaty with Monaco that will allow the throne to pass from Prince Albert to one of his sisters if he dies without an heir. The prince is unmarried, while his sisters, Princess Caroline and Princess Stephanie, both have children. The previous treaty allowed only direct successions in order to prevent the possibility that the throne might pass to a German relative.
Monaco amended its constitution in 2002 to allow the throne to pass to siblings, and the treaty was changed accordingly. France's lower house of parliament has approved the change, while the French Senate is expected to do so in the coming weeks.
Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times contributed reporting for this article.
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In this video image made from ETTV America, Kuan Ming Chen, a deliveryman for a Chinese food restaurant, arrives at a news conference at Montefiore hospital in New York Tuesday, April 5, 2005. Chen, who vanished after taking Chinese food to a Bronx apartment complex, was found alive Tuesday after apparently spending four days trapped in an elevator that had become stuck between floors. (AP Photo/ETTV AMERICA)
Deliveryman Stuck in Elevator for 3 Days
By TOM HAYS, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK - Ming Kuang Chen was written off after vanishing Friday night while making a delivery for Happy Dragon restaurant at a high-rise apartment building.
As police conducted a massive search and days passed, speculation grew that the 35-year-old Chen was the victim of armed bandits or some other urban horror in the Bronx borough.
But more than three days later, the deliveryman emerged with a mean thirst and a tale of survival: He had been stuck by himself in an elevator the whole time, without food or water. He was pulled out at about 5 a.m. Tuesday ? 80 hours later ? by firefighters responding to a security officer's call for help from the high-rise.
"Thanks for everyone caring about me," Chen said afterward in an interview with ETTV, a Taiwan-based news network. "I'm fine now."
Chen ? an undocumented immigrant from the Fujian Province in southeastern China who speaks mostly Mandarin ? apparently tried to tell rescuers how long he had been trapped by circling his watch dial with his finger numerous times, said Charlie Markey, a Fire Department spokesman.
The deliveryman was given water at the scene before being treated for minor dehydration. "He was in very good condition," said Montefiore Medical Center spokesman Steve Osborne. He had no food with him in the elevator, having delivered his last meal.
On Tuesday, authorities ? who conducted a door-to-door canvass of the apartment complex over the weekend looking for Chen ? were questioning why police officers and the building's private security force found no sign of Chen, who claimed he had repeatedly cried out and pushed an alarm button in the elevator.
"I tried to knock (down) the door and kept screaming for help, but no response," Chen said in the television interview. "During the time I was stuck in the elevator, I just kept sleeping because I don't know what else to do."
Chen was last seen about 8:30 p.m. Friday after making three deliveries at the same apartment complex in the Bedford Park neighborhood. He later told police through a translator that he had entered an elevator on the 32nd floor of a 38-story building when it plunged down and became stuck between the third and fourth floors.
An investigation on Tuesday determined that the security camera and alarm system in the elevator were working. But security officers told police they didn't hear or see Chen until security workers responded to his calls early Tuesday. Chen said his pleas using the intercom were answered, but that the language barrier was too great.
Even maintenance workers who were called to check out the disabled elevator on Monday missed Chen, police said.
Those questions aside, Mayor Michael Bloomberg marveled at Chen's good luck.
"If they were there and they searched and they didn't find him, thank God it turned out that he's OK," the mayor said. "I think we should all be thankful that the man's alive."
James L. Stanfield
Millions Overflow Streets of Rome to Pay Tribute to Pope
By IAN FISHER
VATICAN CITY, April 6 - The streets around St. Peter's Basilica swelled with an estimated million pilgrims today, nearly double the barely manageable number the day before. That meant Julie and Christy Krommer, sisters from Cincinnati, were likely to wait in line to see the body of Pope John Paul II longer than the nine hours it took to fly here.
"Because of everything John Paul did for us, any amount of waiting is fine," said Julie Krommer, 23, a mechanical engineer who arrived in Rome at 3 a.m. local time today, as the waiting times to see the pope's body stretched to 10 or 12 hours or more.
On a day when cardinals announced they would begin selecting a new pope on April 18, the crowds in this sudden pilgrimage for John Paul, who died on Saturday, overflowed as people from around Europe and North America began arriving in Rome in huge numbers.
The surge was so great that Italian officials sent out text messages to cellphones and broadcast warnings on the radio for people not to join the huge line: Newcomers, they warned, would not reach the basilica before Thursday night, when the public viewing ends in anticipation of the pope's funeral and burial on Friday, itself an unprecedented spectacle here with heads of state from over 100 nations and hundreds of thousands of spectators.
By this evening, overwhelmed public safety officials said they would shut down the line at 10 p.m., though they had not decided how to do it as pilgrims kept arriving. The line had grown so big that it split in two - one curving through the narrow streets of Vatican City and a second along the Tiber River - amid much strain and a striking mix of the spiritual and the physical: There were songs and prayers and much patience, as well as fatigue, sunburn and borderline bad behavior.
"They have called me mean, they say I have no pity," said Mariana Santoliquido, 27, who works in a café at about the point where people waited in line for 10 hours. She was yelled at because the café stopped letting pilgrims use the bathroom, though she said so many used it the day before the toilet actually ripped off its bolts in the floor.
The abuse was so bad, she said, the café was forced to hire a bodyguard.
"The ugly thing about all this is that the nature of the crowd is so different from what they are here for," she said.
With a handful of exceptions, the crowd was calm in what is turning out to be a huge weeklong celebration of the life of John Paul II that is clearly pleasing church officials - even it has raised questions about whether the church can sustain such fervent enthusiasm for the next pope.
"Splendid!" enthused one of the most powerful cardinals, Renato Martino, as he walked through the crowds just outside the basilica and browsed a stand selling cheap John Paul II cards and rosaries.
Down the street, the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, editor of the Catholic magazine America, who arrived in Rome from New York on this morning, said the numbers showed a level of personal affection for John Paul II - here in Italy and around the world - that many people did not fully grasp before his death.
"The numbers are extraordinary," Father Reese said. "I had heard about the numbers but coming here and seeing it is overwhelming. And it's just getting bigger."
As the Vatican prepared for the elaborate and high-powered funeral Mass on Friday, cardinals met for the third day since the pope's death and settled the first important detail in the selection of a new pope.
Dr. Joaquín Navarro-Valls, the chief Vatican spokesman, said the conclave of cardinals to elect the next pope would begin on April 18, at 10 a.m. after a Mass. There are 117 so-called elector cardinals, those under 80 years of age, and they will meet twice a day in secrecy and cut off from the world until they choose a new pope.
Meantime, the number of cardinals of all ages traveling to Rome, for the funeral and then the conclave, continued to rise: At the meeting today, there were 116 cardinals, 32 of who just arrived here, Dr. Navarro-Valls said.
He announced too that the Vatican would release on Thursday the pope's last testament - a sort of "spiritual" will of 15 pages that he began writing the year after he was chosen pope, in 1979, and added to over the years.
Dr. Navarro-Valls also announced that, in the testament, the pope did not reveal the name of a cardinal he appointed "in pectore," or "close to the heart" - meaning that the identity of the cardinal will likely never be known. Such a secret naming is usually done for cardinals in countries where Catholics face oppression.
"This is a question that will not present itself again," Dr. Navarro-Valls said.
Jason Horowitz of The New York Times and Elisabetta Povoledo of The International Herald Tribune contributed reporting from Rome for this article.
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Karol Wojtyla, a poet, actor, and playwright, who had been a bishop in Poland for twenty years, was elected Pope by the College of Cardinals on October 16, 1978. Shortly afterward, Yuri Andropov, the head of Soviet intelligence, called the K.G.B.?s station chief in Warsaw and asked furiously, ?How could you have allowed a citizen of a Socialist country to be elected Pope?? The Warsaw rezident, who, during his time in Poland, had developed a knowledge of at least the rudiments of Church procedure, reportedly told Andropov that he would do better to direct his inquiries to Rome.
Andropov?s anxiety was existential and well founded. As a defender of the Soviet faith, Andropov had previously directed the expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from Russia as a threat to the stability of the Union. Now he ordered the First Chief Directorate of the K.G.B. to analyze the potential of a new threat, who had given himself the name John Paul II. According to the Pope?s biographer George Weigel, the hurried analysis by Soviet intelligence determined that Wojtyla?s election had been backed by a German-American conspiracy led by, among others, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter?s national-security adviser. Their goal, the document said, was nothing less than the undermining of the Communist regime in Poland and the ultimate disintegration of the Soviet Union and its satellites?an analysis as preposterous as it was prescient.
John Paul?s reign has been so long, and last week?s vigil so filled with the imagery of raw human suffering?his last, mute appearance at his window, the increasingly dire bulletins?that it was difficult to bring into focus the extraordinary and vital images of the first days of his papacy, days that helped to re-order the world. Not long after his ascension to the Chair of St. Peter, the Pope declared that he would make a ?pilgrimage? to Poland?an event that the Communist Party in Warsaw anticipated with dread. To counteract what it knew would be the destabilizing impact of the visit, the Party sent out a desperate, secret memorandum to the nation?s schoolteachers:
The Pope is our enemy. . . . Due to his uncommon skills and great sense of humor he is dangerous, because he charms everyone, especially journalists. Besides, he goes for cheap gestures in his relations with the crowd, for instance, [he] puts on a highlander?s hat, shakes all hands, kisses children, etc. . . . It is modeled on American presidential campaigns. . . . Because of the activities of the Church in Poland our activities designed to atheize the youth not only cannot diminish but must intensely develop. . . . In this respect all means are allowed and we cannot afford sentiments.
John Paul, who, in 1941, as a young man had seen his parish priests arrested by the Gestapo, and the Polish Church subjugated to Moscow after the Second World War, had come into his papacy telling all who would listen, ?Be not afraid!? As Andropov understood, in his own paranoid way, this was a message as potentially subversive as Solzhenitsyn?s ?Live not by the lie!? When John Paul?s Alitalia 727, named Città di Bergamo, landed in Warsaw on the morning of June 2, 1979, his reception from the Polish people was as fearless as his own unmistakable message, couched in theological language, that the Polish nation?s ?voluntary collaboration? with the Soviet empire could not continue. Over nine days, John Paul spoke to and performed Mass in front of millions in Warsaw, Kraków, Gniezno, Czestochowa, and the village of Oswiecim, the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The reception, as Weigel writes in his book ?Witness to Hope,? was so profoundly emotional, and so obviously political, that during his homily at Jasna Góra, at the shrine of the Black Madonna in the Silesian Basin, the Pope interrupted himself and jokingly wondered what the Italian priests in his entourage must be thinking: ?What are we going to do with this Polish Pope, this Slavic Pope? What can we do?? The crowd of more than a million burst into ten minutes of sustained applause. ?How many divisions has the Pope?? Stalin once asked, and now there was an answer. ?I beg you,? the Pope said later in Kraków, ?never lose your trust, do not be defeated, do not be discouraged.?
Adam Michnik, one of the leading dissidents in Poland, said that the Pope?s visit had brought hope, a challenge to ?dishonourable living,? and the revival of the ?ethos of sacrifice, in whose name our grandfathers and fathers never stopped fighting for national and human dignity.? On August 31, 1980, four hundred and forty-eight days after the Pope left Poland for Rome, at the Lenin Shipyard, in Gdan´sk, an electrician named Lech Walesa signed the agreement (his enormous souvenir pen bore the image of John Paul II) that created Solidarity, the first legal and independent union in the Soviet empire. In March, 1985, a provincial reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. In 1990, another playwright-turned-politician, Václav Havel, welcomed John Paul to Prague after the fall of Communism, saying, ?I am not sure that I know what a miracle is. In spite of this, I dare say that I am participating in a miracle: in a country devastated by the ideology of hatred, the messenger of love has arrived.? And by Christmas night, 1991, Gorbachev, who had found an ally in the Pope, agreed to his empire?s dissolution.
The story of those remarkable years carries with it the temptation of mythmaking and, perhaps, Western self-satisfaction. The Pope?s critique of materialism did not end with his opposition to Communism; it carried over to his critique of the Western world, of consumer culture, and of the decline of the Catholic Church in Europe. His papacy has lasted twenty-six years, and his legacy?as a spiritual leader, a cultural critic, a thinker, a politician, a performer in the media age, and, in his last days, a man determined to provide an example from his own visible demise?is so encompassing that no obituary will make complete sense of it. The Pope?s awareness of his own consistency provoked in many people contradictory reactions. Even as he supported liberation in Eastern and Central Europe, campaigned against the death penalty, attacked the inequalities of capitalism, and condemned both of America?s Iraq wars, the Pope forcefully opposed the leaders of liberation theology in Latin America, and appointed Church leaders who almost uniformly followed his conservative lead on women priests, homosexuality, birth control, and many other issues. Some Catholics, excited by the early euphoria of the papacy, were hoping that John Paul II would follow in the line of John XXIII, the Church liberal who initiated the Vatican II reforms, in 1962. These Catholics have been gravely disappointed, and not a few of them have drifted from the Church.
John Paul II was formed by the twin dramas of twentieth-century European history?Fascism and Communism?and yet, to his sorrow, he watched the Church in Europe lose ground. In Great Britain and France, the number of churchgoing Catholics has declined by fifty per cent since the Second World War; in the United States, bishops are deeply divided over the Pope?s absolutism on so many issues and the dispiriting effect it has had on the number of churchgoers and young men seeking the priesthood. The growth in the Catholic Church, and perhaps its dominant future, has been in Africa and Asia. In recent years, the Pope has tried to make historical amends?asking forgiveness, for example, for the Church?s failure to speak out against the persecution of the Jews. And yet some critics, such as the biographer John Cornwell, have written that the Pope, by not stepping down when he became ill, left power in the hands of Vatican neo-conservatives, who failed to act persuasively on crises ranging from aids to sexual abuse by priests.
Last Friday, as the magazine was closing and the news from Rome grew more grave, we talked with Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, a physicist who decided to study for the priesthood in the early seventies as he sought to understand the political and spiritual upheaval of the time. Albacete, who was born in Puerto Rico and now lives in New York, met Karol Wojtyla in 1976, and the two men became friends.
?I was a parish priest in Washington, D.C., for a very short time and a secretary to the Archbishop when I was told that the Archbishop of Kraków was coming for a visit,? the Monsignor said. ?The thought that this guy would become Pope was absurd. I was told to take good care of him. He was an intellectual, they?d heard, and they thought I could engage him somehow. We met over breakfast, over cornflakes, and we quickly started talking about the truly big questions. I was just so impressed by the intensity of his humanity, an energy, that, if tapped, could power the whole world. I was seeing him without the props of the papacy. We spoke in Italian, but he joked with me that unless I could speak Polish and read his favorite poet, Cyprian Norwid, in the original, well, then I was culturally underprivileged. And, as I am thinking about it now, I remember how he told me about Norwid?s poem ?Chopin?s Piano,? about Chopin?s death and how the end of life is so pregnant with meaning.
?I eventually came to teach a course on the plays that he had written,? Monsignor Albacete went on. ?I especially liked ?Our God?s Brother,? ? which Wojtyla wrote when he was still a seminarian. ?It?s the story of the life of Adam Chmielowski, a nineteenth-century Polish intellectual and painter, who accidentally encounters poverty on the streets of Kraków. He has to ask himself, ?How do I respond to this suffering? Charity? The revolutionary path?? He finally sees that these are all superficial responses and joins the poor, a kind of Franciscan path.? In fact, Chmielowski eventually changed his name to Brother Albert, and devoted his life to the poor, founding the Albertine Brothers. ?When Wojtyla became Pope, he canonized his own character,? the Monsignor said. ?There are still some of his plays that remain unpublished. Most of them were written during the Nazi-Communist period, when he was in the cultural resistance.?
Monsignor Albacete spent three years in Rome under John Paul in the nineteen-eighties, working on issues of Catholic education around the world, and afterward the two men stayed in contact. As the Monsignor was speaking on the telephone, CNN issued a report?premature, as it turned out?that the Pope had died. ?It?s very sad but a relief, too,? Albacete said. ?Lately, when you would see him, his Parkinson?s was such that he couldn?t respond to you with the intensity he wanted. To take away the ability to talk and move meant that he was losing the means to express his personhood. The last conversation we had was in Rome. I was there because he was beatifying a Puerto Rican, Carlos Manuel Rodríguez. I said, ?I protest, Holy Father! I want to be the first Puerto Rican saint!? He smiled, said nothing. Then I said, ?You know, Holy Father, I?m feeling a little guilty. I?ve agreed to go on television after you?ve died to say something or other about you.? He smiled again. Then he said, ?How do they know that I will die first?? He was able to joke. He was not afraid.?
