c. 1999 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ In a striking footnote to history, Pope John Paul II met Friday (Jan. 8) with Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, the first former Communist to lead a major Western European country.

The Polish-born pontiff, once a tireless campaigner against communism, has met with 10 ex-communist leaders since his historic Vatican audience with then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev Dec. 1, 1989, but this was the first time he was faced with one from his own back yard.

John Paul and D’Alema spoke privately for 25 minutes in the pope’s library overlooking St. Peter’s Square.

The Vatican received D’Alema, his family and close aides with full pomp and protocol. The household band played the Italian and Vatican national anthems on their arrival in the 16th century courtyard of San Damaso. Swiss Guards in Renaissance uniforms saluted them and nine members of the papal court wearing morning coats and medals waited with Monsignor James Harvey of Milwaukee, Wis., prefect of the papal household, to escort them to the audience.

The pope greeted the Italian leader at the library door with a correct handshake, but when they emerged the atmosphere had turned cordial.

The dapper, mustachioed D’Alema, a child of the Cold War who describes himself as an unbeliever who nevertheless has great admiration for John Paul, told reporters later he had felt”great emotion”and”extreme tension”at the start of the audience.

This, he said,”immediately dissolved because of the extraordinary capacity of the Holy Father to enter into direct human communication.” Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said they discussed national and international issues, agreeing on the need for peace in Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans.

Closer to home, they talked about the church’s campaign for state subsidies for Catholic and other private schools in Italy, which D’Alema supports, the need for a more effective policy to aid families and find employment for young people and church-state collaboration to preserve Vatican archives and libraries and to prepare for the 25 million pilgrims expected to visit Rome in the year 2000.

The spokesman said they also expressed the hope that a newly formed committee of Vatican and Italian experts would quickly resolve a bitter dispute over Italy’s handling of an investigation into charges linking Cardinal Michele Giordano, archbishop of Naples, with a usury ring.

The cardinal has claimed he is innocent, and outraged Vatican officials charge that taps on Giordano’s telephone and a search of his office last summer by Italian authorities violated the agreement governing church-state relations in Italy.

Following the talks, the pope, pale and leaning on a cane, posed smiling for photographs with D’Alema, his wife Linda, who works in the Italian State Archives, their children, Giulia, 12, and Francesco, 8, and the prime minister’s 12-member entourage.

In a ritual exchange of gifts, D’Alema gave the pope an 18th century carved ciborium, a covered chalice-shaped vessel used to store communion wafers, and the pope presented the prime minister with a bronze relief of the apostles Peter and Paul, both said to have died in Rome.”They are the nexus between the church and Rome,”D’Alema said. John Paul kissed both D’Alema children on their departure.

D’Alema, a former journalist, was born in 1949, the year Pope Pius XII excommunicated all Italians who voted for the Communist Party. He joined the Italian Federation of Young Communists at the age of 14 and became a full-fledged party member five years later.

But the party that D’Alema grew up with was very different from the one with which Pius XII locked horns at the start of the Cold War. By the early 1970s, the Italian Communist Party, the largest in the West, had already begun shedding Marxist orthodoxy and adopting the more pragmatic approach of Eurocommunism.

D’Alema was instrumental in the transformation of the Italian Communist Party into the market-oriented Democratic Party of the Left, beginning in 1989.

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais, last month, D’Alema spoke of his respect for the Roman Catholic pontiff.”John Paul II was a protagonist in the fall of communism, and rightly so,”D’Alema said.”The spiritual vacuum of the countries governed by Communist parties was a given fact. The pope was right.”It’s no secret that I am not a believer,”he said,”but I admire the pope a great deal. It was certainly one of his merits that he warned, immediately after the collapse of communism, of the necessity to criticize capitalism.” DEA END POLK