Incredibly, it’s been almost exactly 30 years since Pope John Paul II made his historic trip to America’s heartland, celebrating mass at a farm in Iowa.  (“We are all farmers,” he said at one point.)  

Well, the spirit of that visit, evidently, lives on in those who were there.

From the Des Moines Register:  

So it was pilgrims who walked rural Iowa highways and suburban neighborhoods and filed from school buses parked on the closed interstate. The great masses huddled, side by side in the bitter cold wind on the grounds of Living History Farms in Urbandale and a country church in Cumming, the day’s first event.

 

Pope John Paul II arrived in a helicopter called Angel One and the largest crowd in Iowa history — 340,000 pilgrims — waited for his sacred message.

Thirty years later, Oct. 4, 1979, is still recognized as one of Iowa’s most blessed and memorable days.

 

The memories are trivial: 9-year-old altar boy Bob Mulvihill’s eyeglasses slid down his nose, and he was too nervous to push them up as the leader of the world’s Catholics asked him if he was Irish.

They are significant: Iowa farmer Tom Frantzen was overcome by the pope’s message and altered his life’s work.

The pilgrims saw the pope as a gentle, humble man of God. He hugged children. His bright, blue eyes locked in on them. He was real.

“When I was a child, Catholics were seen as a far-out people who wore horns,” said Mary Jane Pray, 92, who sang in a choir that day. “I think it softened a lot of people’s hearts, especially if you were not Catholic. He was just a simple priest.”

His message was simple, too, but not easy: Care for the land and serve each other.

It’s exactly what some pilgrims did.

Check out the link for the rest of this long, enlightening and inspiring story.