By Brian Zanzonico
"Patti Ann [Steven's wife, a Malverne village trustee] has a saying: There's no such thing as coincidence, only God incidence," Steven McDonald said in his living room last week. "And we've had a lot of God incidence."
In 1993, McDonald, who had been paralyzed six years earlier by a 15-year-old's bullet in Central Park while on patrol for the New York City Police Department, was rehabilitating in Colorado when he heard that World Youth Day would be held in Denver. Patti, who accompanied her husband to Colorado with son Conor, called family friend John Cardinal O'Connor, leader of the Archdiocese of New York, to see if he could secure passes for the family to attend the World Youth Day Mass at Cherry Creek Reservoir in Denver. O'Connor had accompanied Patti to Rome in 1988, where she met the pope for the first time and he blessed her husband's wedding band. O'Connor came through with the tickets for the Denver Mass, but was unable to get the McDonalds passes for a youth service.
"I remember telling Father Mychal Judge [chaplain of the FDNY, who died on 9/11] that if I can get Steven close enough, [the pope] could bless him."
The odds were against them, but that didn't stop the McDonalds from trying to get into the night youth service. It was a five-mile ride from the hotel to Cherry Creek Reservoir, and Denver and Colorado state police and National Guardsmen were at checkpoints every quarter mile. At the first checkpoint, Judge leaped out of the van and identified himself as the FDNY chaplain. Though they lacked the youth-service credentials, the van had a motorcycle escort the rest of the way to the reservoir.
"Kids were chasing the van," Steven McDonald said. "They thought the Holy Father was in there."
When Patti told her mother they were going to try to get into the youth service a day earlier, her mother told her to look for a Secret Service agent named Madeline Conway. The McDonalds laughed off the astronomical odds of bumping into the agent, but when the van arrived at the reservoir, the first security person to greet them was a woman with a nameplate over her heart that read M. Conway.
Conway introduced the family to Jim Heavey, a New Yorker who was the head of the security detail. Heavey was able to position the McDonalds and Judge in front of the altar. At the end of the night, Heavey asked the McDonalds if they would like to meet the pope, and brought them around to the end of the stage. A short while later, O'Connor came walking down the stairs, spotted Patti and gave her a slight smile. To his right was the pontiff. John Paul II approached the McDonalds and Judge, blessed the couple and Conor and chatted with them briefly.
"You can tell he was a holy person," Steven said. "It wouldn't have mattered if he were Jewish or Muslim, he was a holy person. There was a peace about him different than any person you've ever met."
Two years later, McDonald was hired by CBS Television to comment on the pope's visit to New York City. McDonald learned that John Paul II was to appear at a seminary in Yonkers, and decided to take a shot at meeting him - again, without credentials. On McDonald's way to Westchester with his wife and her cousin, Father Seamus O'Boyle of the Archdiocese of Westminster, England, the van broke down. An emergency-services vehicle spotted them on the side of the road, and nudged the van to the seminary. When they got there, the McDonalds ran into the son of a family friend who was a Secret Service agent, who was able to get the three inside. When John Paul II came out, the McDonalds were the first people he saw.
"He came right over to us and said, 'I know you two,'" said Patti, whose cousin, Matty O'Brien of Ireland, designed the popemobile for the pontiff's visit to the Emerald Isle in the early 1980s. "It was pretty amazing."
The loss of the pontiff
Despite the pope's frail condition and years of battling Parkinson's disease, Steven McDonald was optimistic that he would pull through. But at 20,000 feet on a flight from France on April 2, the pilot announced to the passengers that John Paul II had passed away.
"I was very saddened by that," he said. "I thought he was going to pull through because he had so much ahead of him, with World Youth Day coming up."
Now the McDonalds, along with the rest of the world, await the announcement of John Paul II's successor.
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