Record Vatican crowds continue a year after pope’s death
By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) – One year ago in April, the city of Rome saw record numbers of crowds when millions of people flocked to the Vatican and St. Peter’s Basilica for the funeral of Pope John Paul II, the conclave of cardinals and the subsequent election of Pope Benedict XVI.
**In just one week, more than 3 million people descended on the Vatican to honor Pope John Paul, who died April 2, 2005.
According to the Vatican, the crowds have just kept coming.**
In just the first eight months of his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI drew nearly 3 million pilgrims to public events.
According to the Prefecture of the Pontifical Household, more than 2.8 million people attended the weekly general audiences, the Sunday blessings, special papal audiences or liturgical celebrations at which Pope Benedict presided.
Also, the number of visitors going through the doors of the Vatican Museums in 2005 broke all records, even surpassing the huge crowds that came during the jubilee year when the museums extended opening hours into the afternoon. Last year, more than 3.8 million people squeezed through the turnstiles. That number was up from more than 3.4 million people in 2004.
Some speculate the unprecedented global media coverage the Vatican received during last April’s papal transition had a hand in putting Rome and the Vatican back on the map as a sought-after tourist destination for both secular globetrotters and Christian pilgrims.
While curiosity about the new pope and the desire to pay homage to the late pontiff with a pilgrimage to his tomb have accounted for some of the boom in visitors, one tour guide said there are other factors involved.
For example, the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the euro, which became Italy’s official currency in 2002, has stabilized, said Paul Encinias, co-founder of the Rome-based Eternal City Tours.
“That means there’s more economic accessibility” for tourists coming from the United States, he said.
While the number of visitors “has definitely increased since last April, it was already on the rise from two years ago,” he said.
“I would say having a new pope accounts for about 5 percent” of the increase in the number of visitors who use the company, said Encinias.
The Colorado native said while tourists want to see Rome’s religious sites their motives are different.
“‘The Da Vinci Code’ is still a buzz over here; now that the movie is coming out, it’s blown in some new interest,” he said. “The secular tourists want to see the religious sites” depicted in Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, “while the Christians want to see the sites, too, but for different reasons.”
An official at the church-sponsored pilgrimage office said employees had seen an increase in the number of pilgrims coming to Rome.
Father Caesar Atuire of Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi told CNS March 15 that the wave of pilgrims has been so big his office has “had to enter into new agreements with Trenitalia and Alitalia (the Italian train and air companies) to offer special pilgrim packages.”
“People want to come to Rome to see the new pope,” he said, as well as to visit the tomb of Pope John Paul. “Also, there is an assumption that this pope will travel less, so people will have to come to Rome to see him.”
He said German tourists are making Italy their vacation destination once again.
“Germans used to come to Italy” and its Adriatic coast, “but the last few years the numbers have gone down as they discovered Croatia and the Dalmatian coast. But since the election of Pope Benedict, this trend has reversed,” said Father Atuire.
