As Pope Drops Defenses, Concerns Mount

RIO DE JANEIRO— Pope Francis' push to bring the papacy to the streets is raising challenges for Vatican officials and local police, who are struggling to guarantee the pontiff's safety as he sheds security measures used by his predecessors.

Pope Francis Visits Rio

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Reuters

Pope Francis waved to a crowd in downtown Rio de Janeiro Monday as he began his first foreign trip as pontiff in a country that is home to the world's largest Roman Catholic population.

Defining Papal Visits

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Associated Press

Over six days, millions of people saw John Paul II in Mexico, pictured, on the first trip of his papacy outside of Italy.

Such concerns soared this week as the pope arrived in Brazil and quickly found himself immersed in scenes of chaos. Crowds swarmed his motorcade. Protesters clashed with police outside his meeting with President Dilma Rousseff.

The commotion exposed a central challenge for history's first Latin American pontiff. Pope Francis wants to re-ground the Roman Catholic Church in grassroots ministry and discard the privilege and regalia that has long surrounded the highest ranks of the church. As an archbishop in Buenos Aires, he regularly visited crime-ridden slums, cloaked in plain clothes to minister to the poor. But as the new leader of 1.2 billion Catholics, the Argentine is now one of the highest-profile figures in the world and a potential target for extremists.

"Francis is determined to keep the filter between himself and ordinary people as thin as possible. At the same time, there's real fear that he's too exposed," said John L. Allen, a longtime Vatican expert who is traveling with Pope Francis in Brazil.

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Upon arriving in Rio de Janeiro on Monday evening, the pope dropped two protocols that have long served to guard pontiffs against unpredictable crowds.

Alternating between a Fiat and an open-topped jeep, Pope Francis dispensed with the bulletproof popemobile adopted by Pope John Paul II after a gunman shot him amid a crowd of faithful in St. Peter's Square in the 1980s.

The pope also made a last-minute deviation from the official and secured route that had been mapped out for his motorcade weeks in advance. Under the plan, the pope had been expected to go directly after landing to a government building to meet Ms. Rousseff. Instead, the pope took a quick detour to Rio de Janeiro's cathedral.

On the way, the pope's driver made a "wrong turn," Vatican officials said, leaving the pope's car snarled in traffic and enveloped by mobs that pressed up against his car and overwhelmed Vatican security forces.

Even John Paul II, a pope renowned for his spontaneity with crowds, deferred to his entourage when it came to his safety, said Franca Giansoldati, a Vatican watcher who has accompanied the Polish pontiff and his two successors on trips abroad.

"I have never seen anything like this," Ms. Giansoldati said. "The security issue is becoming a nightmare for everyone—both the Vatican and the Brazilian government."

Ms. Rousseff's government considers Pope Francis' arrival a dress rehearsal for Rio de Janeiro as it prepares for even bigger events like the World Cup and the Olympics, said Christopher Gaffney, an urbanism professor at Fluminense Federal University just outside of Rio. "There's been a sort of crescendo building with each event being seen as a test case for the Olympics," he said.

Rio itself presents a logistical nightmare for massive events, he said. The city is surrounded by the sea on one side and mountains on the other. Tunnels and overpasses, which provide the sole entrances to some areas, are easily blocked by protestors or choked by police during crackdowns. "One of the risks of Rio is the points of access are so fragile—it makes it massively vulnerable in times like these," Mr. Gaffney said.

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• Pope Visits Brazil During Pivotal Time for Country (07/21/2013)
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Monday's events started as a group of anti-government and gay activists demonstrated outside of the pope's closed-door meeting and ended in chaos, with police throwing and firing tear gas into the crowds. "They brought the pope into a place where there was only one access route," Mr. Gaffney said. "There was no escape route."

The pope was eventually whisked by helicopter to his lodgings in a calmer neighborhood.

Another dicey moment could come on Thursday, when the pope is scheduled to visit Complexo de Manguinhos, a large and historically violent favela, or slum. Manguinhos, whose name refers to the swamp it once was, is one of the densest parts of Rio and only recently came under government control during military and police-led "pacification." Pope Francis was known in Argentina for mingling with Buenos Aires locals in similar spots.

Mr. Gaffney said while the area will likely remain calm during his visit, achieving that security has come at a cost, as the military doubles down there. "This militarization is what the state does to guarantee safe circulation there," he said. "In the favelas they use real bullets, rather than the rubber bullets used against protestors."

Crowd control could also prove complicated as the tech-savvy Brazilians ratchet up their mobile devices to form crowds around the pope. Pope John Paul II's visits and even some of Benedict XVI's forays predated now-common tools like WhatsApp, Facebook and BlackBerry messenger, now used to organize thousands in minutes.

Ender Sanchez, a 30-year-old Venezuelan, said he has been using free wireless signals around town to mobilize his friends to hit up the main events. He said he has been using the television coverage in Rio shops to figure out Pope Francis' whereabouts, then signaling to the rest of his group where they can converge on him. "We can figure out where he'll be next," he said. "It's a combination of Wifi hotspots and TVs when we come across them."