Dealing with the Press...

Fr Jim O'Keefe was press officer for the Pope's visit to York
WHEN 230,000 people from all over the north of England crammed into the Knavesmire racecourse in York to renew their marriage vows in the presence of John Paul II, the atmosphere, like the weather, was in the words of Fr Jim O'Keefe "absolutely FABULOUS!"
For it was the sunny culmination of four months of hard, but exhilarating, work. He had had to take over responsibility for the whole visit when the chief co-ordinator tragically died on the day of his appointment. Suddenly thrown into the thick of it, Fr O'Keefe recalls rolling up his sleeves and just getting on with it...
"We started with nothing no office, no telephone, no fax machine. Within a week we had to hire everything. There were 300 newspapers between Yorkshire and the Scottish borders clamouring for attention, 180,000 copies of the official brochure to be printed we even had to organise a bullet-proof Jaguar in case there was fog and the helicopters couldn't fly!"
One of his first tasks, he remembers, was dealing with a minor rumpus over the grisly execution of 49 Catholic martyrs during the Reformation.
Was it right in these ecumenical times local newspapermen wanted to know for the Pope re-open old wounds by speaking On the very spot where they had died?
But for Fr O'Keefe, John Paul's presence provided a triumphal opportunity to reassert a message of hope in the face of
persecution for all denominations. "It was a statement about the right to worship God whatever your faith."
Then, of course, there were the last-minute crises: which of the two helicopters would His Holiness emerge from? How to fax late changes to the text of the Pope's address up to Edinburgh? Would the handicapped people on the podium be able to see what was going on?
But his lasting memories of the visit, says Fr O'Keefe, are of a the wonderful opportunity it allowed for the secular press to explore Catholic teaching, the chance it gave York's Catholics to feel confident about their faith, and, of course, the generation of so many good memories for so many people.