The Pilgrimage

GRACANICA, Bosnia—Even to me, an unctuous parishioner, making a pilgrimage has always seemed to be a phenomenal waste of time. Upon hearing that the Pope was coming to Bosnia, I was at first apprehensive. The logistics of seeing the Holy Father are not simple, and he had decided to speak in Banja Luka, the capital of the Republika Srpska, a locale markedly hostile to Catholics and Muslims in Bosnia.

Nevertheless, I was possessed to pack my bags. This element of journeying in Bosnia I still haven’t gotten down to a tee. Sunscreen, toilet paper, deodorant—none of these things found their way into my backpack. What did were two Bosnian-English dictionaries and The Mystery of Capital.

Planning routes is impossible here as well. Gracanica is, more or less, my homebase—a Muslim-dominated town about five minutes from the Serb-controlled area of Bosnia. But in order to get to Banja Luka and the Pope, not even the most innocuous parishioner can follow the straight-shot from Gracanica. Instead, a side-trip to find some Catholic traveling companions is necessary; in this case, I was told about the existence of a hold-out cove in nearby Dubrave. Arriving outside the supposed Franciscan monastery here, one can see a faint yellow line surrounding the area’s famed oak trees, denoting the presence of a mine field.

What I found in Dubrave was not a monastery at all, but rather a sordid collection of hold-over clerics from the war. Two men with sagging faces (although they couldn’t have been more than 30 years old) and two elderly nuns whose arms were tattooed with crosses greeted me at the door. “Holy Christ,” I thought instinctively, partaking in their vacant stares, not quite realizing the irony of this thought amidst the devotional community of Dubrave.

“Bog,” I greeted my holy receivers, a Croatian greeting that literally means, “God.”

“Bog,” one beckoned back, filled with such a lack of spirit that he might as well have said “nothing” or “potato.”

The conversation was stilted. What I’d stumbled upon was an end-of-the-road hideaway in an area now controlled by Bosnian Muslims. Perhaps this small Catholic cell had been here during the ethnic cleansing, or maybe they were shuffled here thereafter—either way, this was the Church’s frontier crew, antisocial monstrosities of the kind created by a millenium-plus of facing repression with dogged determination.

It was only after an hour of broken dialogue, explanations that I had never seen the Pope and a coyness I’d been saving for just such an occasion that I won their affection, embodied within a meek (that’s one value these Papists had down) offering of stock and chivas.

This strange group gave me a so-called “ticket” (which was little more than an illegible message on pink stationery) and directed me to a contact in  the multi-ethnic town of Tuzla. There I found a man named Fra Peter in the postmodern hellishness of Tuzla’s Franciscan stronghold, a concrete building replete with bomb-proof glass and giant iron gates that obscure passers-by’s view of the many statues of St. Francis, Mary and Jesus inside the immaculate garden. The scribbles-on-pink won me a proper ticket from him, and at 2 a.m., I returned to the monastery, which was even more spooky at night, only to encounter 350 Catholics running about, scaring the hell out of Tuzla’s many drunks and greeting one another in a language they differentiate from Bosnian—though their lexicons are virtually identical apart from about 20 words (“instead of ‘Bog,’ it’s ‘Allah,’” one explained with total sobriety)—as they tried to organize themselves and board buses to the Mass.

Tired and desparate, I tried to find a seat on one of the buses, helplessly flailing my “Pope ticket” at the Croats, who kept rebuffing me from buses that were reserved for one or another organization. Finally, I did find a bus, sat myself next to a 70-year-old woman who could not stop talking about “Papa,” and spent seven hours unconscious en route to Banja Luka.

The Mass was good. Nothing more can be said about this segment of the voyage. It was wholesome, rife with folk songs as well as Westernized neo-Christian rock. The Pope drove around for a good while in the Popemobile; and by hook or by crook, each Catholic punk rocker willing to use his or her elbows was able to see him close-up, in the flesh: Ivana Pavla Deuce.

And soon after this elderly man was done speaking and a few ambulances were dispatched to resuscitate the chosen few who couldn’t handle the heat, a rush of people flowed from the massive green. Far from a silent, self-reflective end to a mass, the “Croats” (really, they are Bosnians per their nationality, though they call themselves Croats) began singing loud Catholic folk music, waving red-and-white checkerboard flags, wearing shirts of the same colors, passing close to Serb military men who didn’t look at all amused by these outbursts. The same flag remembered largely as the symbol of Croatia’s fascist regime during World War II, under which proper Croats made refugees out of some 300,000 Serbs less than 100 miles away, was now being waved in the faces of Bosnian Serbs, whose reputation is well-publicized in America and elsewhere courtesy of Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and their ilk.

That said, my return to Gracanica was not without some cool Papal loot including a guidebook to Catholicism in Bosnian, a bona fide Bosnian flag and a bright yellow hat decorated with pictures of the Pope. Sunny as it was, I thought about wearing this hat into Gracanica before realizing the emblem would not likely sit well in a town filled with minarets, where vandalizing the old Orthodox Church is a favorite area hobby. The Pope had come on a mission of reconciliation and peace. What I’d seen were fervored Catholic Bosnians waving Croatian flags, a great deal of frustrated Serbs in military regalia and a nation that was on the whole much less excited than me about seeing John Paul II.

Travis R. Kavulla ’06 is a history concentrator in Mather House. While not trailing the Popemobile, he can be found traipsing around Bosnia begging locals for toilet paper in the name of Bog.