Bernstein is the Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of All the President's Men. Politi has covered the papacy for the past nineteen years for Italy's La Repubblica and II Messaggero.

 John Paul II was the first pope to understand the television era, the first one who mastered the medium, who could handle a microphone, who was used to improvising, who wasn't afraid of performing in public.

 Inevitably (and to his great advantage) a war of one-upmanship developed between a pope seeking to impress his audiences (aided by media advisers who were learning quickly) and TV reporters determined to make every broadcast an extraordinary event. Thus agents of the most skeptical and cynical mass media in the world wound up exalting the Roman pontiff in a manner previously unknown and on a scale unique to his person.

 Masses celebrated by Pope Wojtyla became epic performances. Local organizers felt compelled to create more and more fantastic stage designs for his open-air events, turning the papal platforms on which John Paul II celebrated masses into gargantuan Hollywood sets. . . .

 But the pope, fully aware of the profane elements surrounding his appearances (which in richer countries were partly financed through the sale of papal souvenirs), realized that all this was an opportunity for communication. He spoke in a dozen languages. He agreed to wear any of an incredible variety of hats that people offered him: student berets, Mexican sombreros, feathered Indian war bonnets, pith helmets. In Africa he put on goatskins and posed while grasping the spear of a tribal chieftain. In the American West he emerged from a tepee in a fringed chasuble; in Phoenix a group of Native Americans placed him on a revolving platform that turned him around like some sort of sacred wedding cake so that everyone in the audience could see and admire him.

 The papal entourage quickly came to favor this kind of atmosphere and spectacular hype. In keeping with the strategy of Joaquin Navarro-Valls, hired as the Vatican spokesman in 1984 -- a former medical doctor, a correspondent for the Spanish newspaper ABC, and a member of Opus Dei -- TV coverage was given preferential treatment. On the TV screen, as the pope and Navarro-Valls well understood, glory would invariably overshadow problems, emotion would overwhelm insight. Any uncomfortable questions from print reporters would be drowned out.

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