A papal visit to the United States is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and Scott Williams of Crofton wants to use Pope Benedict XVI’s Mass at Nationals Park Thursday to propose to his girlfriend.
There’s just one problem — he can’t get his hands on tickets, and finding a pair is, literally, sinful.
“You can’t buy the tickets, can’t sell the tickets, basically they’re impossible to get,” he said. “I thought maybe somebody has a heart out there, maybe this is a little more important.”
Across Maryland and the world, people are going to great lengths to get tickets to see the pope’s Mass on his first visit to the United States — even though the Archdiocese of Washington said scalping the passes is not only illegal, but a sin.
But Williams is driven to get the tickets. Seeing the pope is “more important than anything” to his girlfriend, who’s completing her theology degree at Mount St. Mary’s University, he said.
“If there’s some way I can do it without breaking rules, I’d love to do it,” he said.
Williams said he wouldn’t do it to just line the ticket-seller’s wallet. He’d rather it be an in-kind exchange.
“I work for Microsoft, I have a skill in IT (information technology), and can fix just about any computer on this planet, so maybe I can offer my services to him (the seller) for a monetary value — something that I can do that’s worth it to them, but not money,” Williams said. “If it’s $400, I’ll clean your house for a month, I’ll take your kids out to a baseball game twice a week.”
Donald Powell, a retiree living in Laurel, said he was looking for tickets so his mother-in-law — visiting from the Philippines — could attend the Mass with his wife. He saw no problem paying for tickets, as long as he knew the money was going to good cause.
“If somebody wants to see him bad enough, and they would pay some money, I don’t think it’s bad or outrageous,” Powell said. “As long as it’s going to a charity, I see no problem with that at all.”
But Susan Gibbs, communications director for the Archdiocese of Washington, said selling the tickets is against church law.
A Roman Catholic Church Mass is considered a sacrament, she said, and scalping the passes is equivalent to selling a sacrament, which is forbidden.
Passes are also the nontransferable property of the archdiocese. If ticket holders can’t use them, they should tell their source for the pass, she said.
There’s a designated process for assigning unneeded tickets, she said.
“You need to go talk to your pastor — your parish only got, you know, 20 tickets, because they’re meant for other parishioners, not anyone in the United States,” she said.
Tickets were scarce to begin with — 200,000 people applied for 46,000 passes, Gibbs said. The archdiocese also has a 10,000-name wait list for seats.
If the archdiocese sees a seat or section number on sale, it can cancel that ticket or flag a row for monitoring. Mass attendees must show identification at the park’s front gate.