Tickets key to view of pope

Anger, disappointment, and confusion greeted the latest news that visitors hoping to get close to Pope Francis' stages and altar here this month will need free tickets - and that most are already allocated.

Just 15 percent of the pilgrims expected to turn out to see Francis at the Festival of Families on Sept. 26 and his celebration of Sunday Mass the next day will have access to a secured, grassy, 57-acre zone on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway closest to his staging area, the World Meeting of Families announced midweek.

If 750,000 people come Saturday and a million on Sunday - as organizers project - that would give prime access to 112,000 to 150,000 people along 40 percent of the entire Parkway space.

Most tickets will go, the World Meeting said, to Catholic parishes, Catholic social service workers, religious sisters and brothers, and those attending the Congress of the World Meeting that begins Sept. 22.

Another 25,000 tickets will become available online to the general public on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Blocks away from the papal stage, the remaining 88 acres of the secure zone, or 60 percent, will apparently be much more crowded with unticketed visitors - from 638,000 to 850,000 people.

All the secure zones will be accessed only through checkpoints with magnetometers, or metal detectors.

Sightlines to the stage and altar will be mostly blocked in the unticketed area by office buildings, however, so most pilgrims will be left to see Francis on Jumbotrons, or catch a glimpse of him as his motorcade circles the Parkway on both days of his two-day visit.

Mayor Nutter defended the ticketing and zoning arrangement Saturday, saying it was necessary to ensure order.

"Logic would say not everybody can be up front," he said in a phone interview. "There's only so much room." Giving better access to people who are especially active in the Catholic Church "makes sense," Nutter said.

The World Meeting's executive director, Donna Crilley Farrell, also defended the extensive use of zoned access and tickets.

"Is it elitist to outreach to the lay faithful, representing our 219 parishes across the five-county region, and invite them to be here for this historic moment in the life of their Church?" Farrell asked in an email reply to a request for comment.

"Is it elitist to include our women religious who have devoted their lives to the mission of the Church? Is it elitist to include the homeless and those most marginalized by society who are served by Catholic Social Services in this ticket allocation?"

News of the ticketing was a shock, however, to Lillian Spencer of Eddystone, who thought she had the perfect plan for seeing Francis say Mass on the Parkway.

"I would get on the 6 a.m. train out of Marcus Hook," the 55-year-old legal secretary explained. "I'd get downtown and be up close as possible all day.

"But without a ticket I can't past 20th Street," she said. "So what's the point of going?"

Because she is divorced and remarried without an annulment, she feels "excommunicated" from the Catholic Church, Spencer said. She wanted to see Francis because he has been "so welcoming" of people in her situation.

Spencer said she was undecided whether she would still make the journey.

Forty Jumbotrons will enhance the experience of ticketholders and non-ticketholders alike, according the World Meeting. Fourteen will be in the front, ticketed zone. Four will be in the middle, 31-acre unticketed secure zone near Logan Circle.

Getting out news of the zones and tickets made for a hectic, confusing week for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the World Meeting of Families, hosts of the papal visit.

The Secret Service released a map of the secure zones on Wednesday and announced that tickets would be needed for the zone closest to Eakins Oval, where the altar and stage will be.

But that announcement took the archdiocese and World Meeting staff by surprise. Farrell and others said they had expected to announce the ticketing after Labor Day - with news that Francis would encircle the crowds with two motorcades.

In its haste to explain the ticketing, however, it issued a press release late Wednesday saying that "85 percent of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway is open to the public."

When the disparities in acreage were noted, however, organizers said Friday that the 85 percent figure represented the number of unticketed pilgrims it expected would turn out.

"If our selected language was unclear, we apologize," Meg Kane, spokeswoman for the World Meeting, said Saturday. She outpointed that tickets were used in 1979, when Pope John Paul II came to Philadelphia.

Promoters described the unticketed visitors' territory on Saturday as a secure middle zone of 31 acres running east from 20th Street to Logan Circle, and another 57 secured acres farther away, around City Hall and South Broad Street.

On Sunday security will be lifted from the acres around City Hall and South Broad street.

Kane also noted that while the ticketed zone will have seven security checkpoints and the unticketed zones six, "the number of magnetometers at each location will correspond to the anticipated crowd pressure expected at these entrances."

In response to much negative outcry to Wednesday's announcement about the ticketing, the World Meeting and archdiocese announced that it would make 25,000 more tickets available online to the general public.

"We heard the concern," Farrell told a hastily called news conference on Thursday. Five thousand more tickets will be made available online Tuesday at noon for Pope Francis' 4 p.m. address, likely on immigration and religious freedom, Sept. 26 on Independence Hall.

The Web address for the tickets will be http://www.worldmeeting2015.org/tickets.

Only four tickets will be allowed per person, on a first-come, first-served basis.

Ten thousand more tickets to that evening's Festival of Families, and another 10,000 for the next day's Mass, will become available at that same web address starting noon on Wednesday.

News of the tickets irked and surprised many in the local hotel industry. "Changing the game this close to the event is just not fair," Ed Grose, executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Hotel Association, said Thursday.

Many area hotels still have rooms available, he said, because would-be visitors to the papal events are concerned about the difficulty of access.

But Nutter said Saturday he believed the large number of unbooked rooms was because some hotels were charging "outrageous" prices - some as much as $1,000 a night, with a three-night mininum.

"They completely overestimated the clientele and market," Nutter said. "These [pilgrims] are not $1,000-a-night people."

Nutter was emphatic Saturday about the need for tickets and zoned access, and said that he was surprised at the negative reaction to the news of them.

"I don't know what was going on in folks' minds. When the magnetometers open on Friday morning, did they think there was going a Black Friday rush where everybody shoves their way in?"

But the numerous calls and emails to The Inquirer and other area news organizations about the ticketing suggest that many pilgrims just supposed they could see Francis up close.

"A parade and a Jumbotron don't have the same effect," lamented John Kassell, 28, of Akron, Ohio, whose planned trip to Philadelphia at the end of the month was built, he said, around hopes of seeing Francis in person.

Zoned access "just goes against the pope's message," said Kassell, a freelance weather forecaster who said his grandmother would join him.

Seeing Francis live and up close would have been "a life-changing event," the devoutly Catholic Kassell said. "But the popemobile you might see for what, 30 seconds?"

Kassell's distress was a measure of the initial confusion attending the announcement of ticketing. But during a phone interview he learned that he and his grandmother would have better access after all.

As registered attendees of the Congress of the World Meeting, he was told he would have tickets to the closer viewing area. His distress turned to relief.

"That just made my day better," he said. "But I feel sorry for the people who will be fighting for tickets."

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