The smile of Pope John Paul II
The leading PR expert and CEO of the communication agency M3 Communications Group, Inc., Mr. Maxim Behar shares his exciting acquaintances, interesting experiences and the lessons he learns in his author’s series Priceless Lessons, which he publishes for BGLOBAL magazine.
The smile of Pope John Paul II
The Holy Father became the first sovereign of the Vatican City to visit Bulgaria and had the first special website in the whole history for his visit.
As with this story, I wonder why so many occasional meetings and unique ideas have happened on Sundays. Surprisingly, we went for a cup of coffee that afternoon with the press director of the Atlantic Club in Bulgaria at the time, later a longtime director of the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA), who passed away recently. I saw in his eyes a special glow while sitting on the low chairs in the cafe of the Archaeological Museum in Sofia…
- To know, in great secrecy, I’m sharing only with you, Solomon Passy called me just now and told me that Pope John Paul confirmed he was coming to Bulgaria. There is less than a month until his arrival. It is essential and quite urgent to come up with something genius.
While listening to him and waiting for my coffee, I had already opened my mobile phone and registered a site for the Pope’s visit to Bulgaria… My idea was obvious — it was a unique opportunity to promote Bulgaria worldwide in the best possible way. There are nearly 1.4 billion people in the world who have identified themselves as Catholics. Even if half of them were interested in this unique visit, this would be a remarkable chance for Bulgaria.
A week earlier, with Solomon Passy — the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time and the main driver of the invitation to the Pope, we were clarifying the last details of the reception. We even knew precisely when the Pope would stop to bless the legendary East German car of Passy — the Trabant, which became a symbol of the irreversible Euro-Atlantic future of another country in Eastern Europe — Bulgaria. It was impossible to give him a ride in it; he was already relatively thin and moving with a walker. I made a particular television studio to constantly broadcast His Holiness’s stay. The prestigious Hilton hotel, at the time run by another great and irreplaceable friend, Armin Zerunyan, hospitably provided us with beautiful facilities, while colleagues from my company, M3 Communications Group, Inc., armed with cameras, microphones, mobile devices set off with the Pope’sPope’s motorcade around the country.
We were all so happy. Our servers could barely withstand the millions of visitors. Solomon Passy and Armin Zerunyan attended the studio’s opening, watched by at least 40 countries from all continents. Our operators were broadcasting every minute what was happening… and one day, as I was editing my consecutive texts, my cell phone rang. A kind voice told me that Pope John Paul II would be happy if I could take some time to talk to him the next day at two o’clock in the afternoon. It sounded so absurd and strange that, at first, I thought it was a joke provoked by the big media noise around the studio. I was partly right — when I briefly asked what the reason was, the voice opposite said softly:
- His Holiness is hugely flattered by your attention to his visit. His team found out just last night that with 32 trips so far in the 24 years since he has been the Pope and nearly 650 audiences and visits by heads of state, someone has made a unique website for his visit. Usually, the relevant Ministries of Foreign Affairs or the Vatican Embassies do it on their local websites. The Pope would like to meet with you and award you his special gold medal from his historic visit to Bulgaria.
So… the next day, I went on August 11th Street in Sofia at the Vatican Embassy. It was really early in the afternoon, and after waiting about an hour for His Holiness to rest, I went in, kissed his hand, and it was my turn to surprise him — I started the conversation in the Polish language, and so it went for the rest of the visit. The Pope was pleasantly surprised; he told how impressed he was by his reception in Orthodox Bulgaria; he had not yet visited the predominantly Catholic city of Rakovski — it was for the next day. He also told me how delighted he was regarding his meetings with King Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Bulgaria’s prime minister. While his spokesperson, the famous Joaquin Navarro, insistently handed him the medal to give it to me, he asked quietly, but very quietly:
- We thank you very much for considering making a particular site for my visit; no one has done it before. What made you make this massive effort? Please tell me.
I started a little worried:
- Your Holiness, your visit to Bulgaria is a unique chance for people worldwide to understand what you have seen here — this wonderful country of young, intelligent, and ambitious people with fantastic nature, climate, and environment. In addition — of course, more than a billion Catholics around the world — want to know every minute how you feel and what messages you send to them… Not to mention that there is no better media so far than the one on the Internet, which is in real-time…
The Pope smiled thoughtfully, was silent for a few minutes, lifted himself towards Navarro, handed me the medal in a red box, and said to me:
- I pass it on to you completely deservedly, and thank you for these words. More people around the world should hear them. I know the future is there, and we must all follow how these communications develop.
I left happy. I will forever remember this kind and thoughtful smile… I guessed, but I still did not know. Less than a year and a half later, boys from Harvard University invented the product that Pope John Paul II was so curious to know.
They called it Facebook.