The pope’s six-city US visit in October 1979, which began in Boston and included stops in New York and Washington, was perhaps the most anticipated event in the history of the American Catholic Church, and the excitement was shared by non-Catholics. The evangelical preacher Billy Graham described John Paul as “the most respected religious leader in the world.” President Jimmy Carter, a devout Southern Baptist, welcomed him to the White House: “God blessed America by sending you to us.”
For many of the nation’s fifty million Catholics, there was disappointment, however. In advance of the pope’s trip, the Associated Press conducted a poll of the nation’s Catholics and found 66 percent wanted the Vatican to lift the ban on birth control, 53 percent believed priests should be allowed to marry, and 50 percent believed women should be granted abortion on demand. In the pope’s speeches in the US, he made clear he would compromise on none of those issues. He often adopted a scolding tone, suggesting Americans were out of step with the church’s moral teachings, especially about sex.
Catholic women had special reason to feel slighted during the trip. Since Vatican II, nuns had been allowed in many US dioceses to join priests at the altar and handle communion wine and wafers. It was seen by bishops as a way of dealing with a shortage of priests. In advance of the pope’s trip, however, the Vatican announced that women would be barred from any role in worship services that he attended. When he gave a speech in Philadelphia to twelve thousand clergy from around the country, priests were invited to sit in the audience on the main floor of the auditorium, while nuns were moved to the balcony. In that address, the pope made his most explicit statement to date of his conviction that women could never be priests: the all-male priesthood was “a tradition that cannot be altered.”
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