The Vatican Shrine

If you look close enough, you can find extraordinary aspects in the ordinary.

Flushing Meadows Corona Park's Unisphere

Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens is well known for being home to the Unisphere, a stainless steel model of the Earth constructed for the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair. Standing a gleaming twelve-feet high, the monument remains perhaps one of the most emblematic symbols of the borough. Yet the park hides a treasure just as enchanting as this sphere that requires some exploration.

The Vatican Shrine

Far off to the park’s right side rests a shrine commemorating the former site of the Vatican Pavilion. The pavilion was one of the most popular attractions at the 1964-1965 World’s Fair, top among other pavilions such as those put forth by General Motors and IBM.¹ Prevailing over the building were a lantern and cross that rose to a height of one hundred feet.

While this popular attraction may be no more, a modest granite structure currently takes its place. However, it isn’t one that is easy to come across. If you happened to be walking through the park briskly, I dare say you’d probably miss it. In fact, even a map located outside of the park makes no indication of its existence.

Circled in red is the location of the Vatican shrine--not indicated on the map.

I myself wouldn’t have known about it if it hadn’t been for a particularly intriguing homily given by my local parish priest about a year ago. He had attended the World's Fair and was painting for his Roman Catholic parishioners an iridescent picture of the ecstatic atmosphere created by those visiting the replica, so engaging that it stuck with me all this time. 

The Vatican shrine is “behind the theater, but most likely covered with snow,” as I was informed by one of the employees at the Queens Museum. Luckily for me, any snow that may have been on it had been shoveled off, revealing a beautiful cross engraved into the granite. In witnessing it, I began to comprehend what Dorothy Day posited as sacramentality in The Long Loneliness. Looking at the inanimate object before me, I felt a presence greater than myself radiating in the atmosphere around me. Day recognizes that everything is potentially a bearer of God's grace. In one instance, she finds herself "praying with thanksgiving, praying with open eyes..."² .God's presence, for her, is not restricted to the church, can be found everywhere in life. While I cannot ascertain that what I felt was God's grace, I was overcome with a sense of awe for the piece of history in front of me.

Circling the Vatican shrine are the words “Site of the Vatican Pavilion. New York World's Fair 1964-1965.”

A few inches away from this stone and forming the shape of an oval around it is a raised platform with inscriptions on three stones. The inscription on the left reads:

The Vatican Pavilion  

Francis Cardinal Spellman

President

Most Reverend Bryan J McEntegart

Vice President

The words on the center stone read:

“This the site of the Vatican Pavilion was authorized by Pope John XXIII, visited on October 4, 1965 by Pope Paul VI during his mission of peace to the United Nations. The building exhibited Michelangelo’s Pieta and other art treasures. It symbolized the brotherhood of man, the spirit of ecumenism, and the theme of the New York World’s Fair 1964-1965: Peace through understanding.”

The stone on the right simply states: “The Vatican Pavilion was dedicated on April 19, 1964.”

Pope Paul VI’s mission of peace, which is mentioned in the shrine, refers to the address that he delivered to the United Nations on October 4^th, 1965, in which he stressed the importance of developing empathy for others by highlighting coexistence, the idea of creating a bridge between peoples, a disarmament which he believed would lead to no more wars, and an uplifting of the moral conscience of humanity.³

Ecumenism refers to the “doctrine, or quality, of universality, especially of the Christian church."⁴ The idea of ecumenism was employed not only in the Vatican Pavilion, but also in the World's Fair as a whole. It was to be a universal exposition centered on, as the inscription reads, the theme of “peace through understanding,” and dedicated to “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe."⁵ Quite ironically, the majority of those exhibiting at the fair were American corporations.

Since the 1964-1965 World's Fair highlighted American technological advances of the mid-20^th century, it is interesting to consider what Reinhold Niebuhr would have thought about the spectacle. For one, he feared that technology was one of the roots of the social problems of the day. In Moral Man and Immoral Society, he argues that a technological civilization makes stability impossible in that it changes the circumstances of life too rapidly. It “destroys the physical symbols of stability and therefore makes for restlessness..."⁶ In addition to this, he makes the point that the tendencies of an industrial era manage to increase the injustices suffered by humanity. In a world where these is injustice, there cannot be peace.

Peace through understanding, however, suggests the great power of empathy in achieving unity. The fact that fifty-one million people attended the 1964-1965 World's Fair attests to how successful it was in bringing the masses together in celebration of a global interdependence.⁷

The Vatican shrine itself provides enough room for you to sit down upon, acting as a type of bench. Seemingly isolated from the rest of the park, it is a spot to be able to relax and take a moment to contemplate life. There are different denominations within Christianity but, with the idea of ecumenism in mind, it is crucial to recognize that they all share a belief to do unto others as you would have done unto you. And, after all, isn’t this what is at the heart of most religions? Despite superficial differences, we are all humans and share a common heritage because of this. The shrine serves to remind us, in a time and place where we are quick to forget, that we are more alike than we are different.  

As Pope Paul VI remarked in the very same address inscribed in the stone of the Vatican shrine, “The hour has come for a halt, a moment of contemplation, of reflection, almost of prayer; a moment to think anew of our common origin, our history, our common destiny.”⁸

Time has taken its toll on the shrine, and this is obvious in the gradual wear noticeable on some of the letters on the stones. Despite this a sense of timelessness is nonetheless conveyed; merely stepping into the circle leads you to imagine the tremendous excitement that the site must have seen in 1964 and 1965 and the grandiosity of the structure that was the Vatican Pavilion, itself a representation of a material religiosity.

Here, occasionally interrupted by the noise provided by the Grand Central directly behind it, you can strive to find harmony and inner peace.

Footnotes

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1 "New York World's Fair." NYC AGO. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2015.^↩
2 Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist (New York: Haper Collins, 1997), 117.^↩
3 "Pope Paul VI's Address to United Nations General Assembly, October 4, 1965." N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2015.^↩
4 "Ecumenism, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 28 Feb. 2015.^↩
5 "New York World's Fair." NYC AGO. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2015.^↩6 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man And Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (United States: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), 275-276.^↩
7"New York World's Fair." NYC AGO. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2015.^↩
8"Pope Paul VI's Address to United Nations General Assembly, October 4, 1965." N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2015.^↩