PHILADELPHIA — Amanda Cortes is not anyone’s idea of a dignitary.
She grew up poor in an overcrowded house. She worked for years as a phone-sex operator. Since 2010, she has been awaiting trial in Philadelphia on charges that she brutally murdered her infant son.
But on Sept. 27, she will meet the pope.
So will Irma Barragan, who was 16 when her parents paid a smuggler to take her across the border from Mexico. Pope Francis will visit an East Harlem school in New York City on Sept. 25 to personally thank her and other immigrant women who are embroidering the altar linens he will use when he offers Mass at Madison Square Garden.
“When I see him on the news, I feel very moved, almost like I want to cry,” said Barragan, 37. She said she trembles to think of simply laying a hand on the man who physically embodies her faith. “If I am there and I have the opportunity to,” she said, “I will touch him.”
A papal visit is always an occasion of high ceremony and high-level politics. When Francis comes to the East Coast next week, he will, like his predecessors, visit the president and address the United Nations. He will pray with bishops. He will celebrate Mass before enormous crowds.
But to an unparalleled degree, this pope is making a point of spending time with people on the bottom rungs of U.S. society: day laborers, refugees, the homeless, underprivileged schoolchildren and prisoners.
Like no pope before him, Francis is using the grand stage of his trip to the United States to demonstrate that the church exists to serve the poor and marginalized, and that this is the responsibility of all Catholics — whether pontiff or parishioner.
In Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, Francis has seven events scheduled at which he will interact with ordinary people. Previous papal trips to the United States — there have been five extended ones — have included only one or two such meetings, at most.
These meetings are expected to be brief and largely symbolic: Each group the pope will visit represents a cause he has taken up, as he urges world leaders and the 1.15 billion Roman Catholics he shepherds to lift up their humblest neighbors.
For the approximately 900 people who will spend time with the pope, though, the symbolism is reality, and many are anticipating the moment with a mix of powerful emotions. Especially for those who are poor and struggling, meeting the pope amounts to a brush with grace, and a rare public honor.
In Philadelphia, he will minister to 100 inmates and their families at the city’s largest jail.
At a church in Washington, he will meet and bless about 250 participants in assistance programs run by Catholic Charities.
Among them will be Rudolph Washington, 48, for whom the papal audience is one more dramatic turn in a tumultuous life that has included dealing drugs, a car crash that damaged his brain and left him temporarily paralyzed and, through a rehabilitation program for ex-prisoners, a leadership role in an Alcoholics Anonymous group.
Though Washington is a Baptist, he has been studying up on the pope and likes what he sees.
“I’m looking at a world leader, a religious leader, but also I look at the example that he brings, that he’s a humble guy,” he said.
Those who will meet the pope were chosen based on considerations that were as often practical as spiritual.
At Our Lady Queen of Angels elementary school in East Harlem, the third- and fourth-graders in the classroom the pope will visit must endure a lengthy pre-pope security lockdown and an intense news media presence.
“There are certain kids who will thrive under that kind of pressure, and certain kids who will not,” said Fran Davies, a spokeswoman for the New York Archdiocese’s schools, “so principals made an assessment of who do they think would enjoy the experience and get the most out of it.”
Similarly, officials of Catholic Charities in Washington excluded those with mental illnesses or addictions so acute that they would be unlikely to wait for three hours in a closed space.
Of the 30 women in the sewing groups Catholic Charities runs in Yonkers, New York, only half are embroidering the altar linens for the New York Mass, and even fewer will ultimately meet the pope. They were chosen for their sewing abilities — all submitted embroidery samples as proof of skill — and their dedication to the organization.
You do not have to be poor or obscure to meet the pope. At the National September 11 Memorial, the pope is likely to receive a small group of victims’ kin. At the airport in Philadelphia, he will be met by the family of Rick Bowes, a former police officer who was wounded in a shootout.
In Philadelphia’s prison system, officials announced that a special visitor with religious ties was coming — they did not say who — and asked inmates if they wanted to meet him. The main criterion for being picked “was that you couldn’t be someone who was constantly breaking rules and policies,” said Shawn Hawes, a prison spokeswoman.
Among the inmates invited to meet the pope was Cortes, 30. Still awaiting trial, she has blamed her older son, who was 5 at the time in 2010, for the fatal beating of her 8-week-old, prosecutors said, adding that her trial has been delayed by her defense team. (Her lawyer declined to comment.)
Cortes said her religious awakening came soon after she arrived at Riverside Correctional Facility, the city’s main jail for women.
“I just remember thinking, ‘I’m in a very big pickle,’” she said in an interview in a classroom at the jail. “I don’t want to get at the cliché of jailhouse religion, but I definitely got a lot more serious here. I think human nature is you grasp everything, this lawyer and that lawyer, and after an amount of time, it’s like, ‘What else do you have?’”
Now, Cortes works as a chaplain’s assistant and is involved in several faith-based programs at Riverside — where there are some ruffled feathers among those who will not get to meet the pope.
“They’re a little jealous right now,” said Ruth Colon, 35, an Apostolic Christian and reformed addict, who will meet the pope while serving a year’s sentence for a probation violation. “A lot of people are like, ‘You’re not even Catholic!’”
A few who will meet the pope are taking the honor in stride. “He’s just another man like us — we’re all people,” Cortes said.
Others, like Wanderlen Martinez, who fled Honduras alone at age 14 and made his way through Guatemala and Mexico dodging armed gangs and riding atop freight trains, confessed that they knew very little about Francis.
“I need to do more research,” said Wanderlen, who is now 17 and lives in the New York City borough of the Bronx, where Catholic Charities is helping him with his immigration case. “Right now, I’m not sure why people are so interested in him, so I don’t know how to feel.”
But many of the faithful look forward to what they expect to be one of the highlights of their lives. “He is the one who is closest to God,” said Ignacia Gonzalez, a member of the embroidery group.
And they are weighing what exactly to say and do when they meet the pope.
Bowes is hoping he does not mess up when the man he called a “future saint” gets off the plane.
“I don’t even know if you shake his hand. I told my pastor, ‘You have to give me some etiquette on how to greet the pope.’”
Gonzalez, the embroiderer, said she hoped the pope would pray for her reunion with her parents, whom she has not seen since she left Mexico 12 years ago. “I long for them,” she said, tears streaking her face.
And for a pope who often turns the tables and asks his subjects to pray for him, some hope to bring a gift.
Gonzalez wants to embroider a handkerchief with a dove to give to Francis, if giving gifts is allowed. “It represents peace,” she said, “and he brings that to us.”
Washington, the Baptist who receives services through Catholic Charities, said he would bring along a volume of memoirs written by members of an adult literacy program to which he belongs. (His own chapter is called “The Beginning of My Success Story.”)
“I’m hoping that if he can get a copy,” Washington said, “and he can read this, maybe, just maybe, he can get some more ideas or come up with something that can work for others.”
