Pope beatifies John Paul before a million faithful

Bellevision Media Network

Vatican City, 01 May 2011: Pope Benedict XVI beatified Pope John Paul II before more than a million faithful in St. Peter’s Square and surrounding streets on Sunday, moving the beloved former pontiff one step closer to possible sainthood. The crowd in Rome and in capitals around the world erupted in cheers, tears and applause as an enormous photo of a young, smiling John Paul was unveiled over the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica and a choir launched into hymn long associated with the Polish-born pope.

 

“He restored to Christianity its true face as a religion of hope,” Pope Benedict said in his homily, which was dotted with personal recollections of a man Pope Benedict said he came to “revere” during their near-quarter century working together. Beatification is the first major milestone on the path to possible sainthood, one of the Catholic Church’s highest honours. A second miracle attributed to John Paul’s intercession is needed for him to be canonised.

 

The beatification, the fastest in modern times, is a morale boost for a church. Police placed wide areas of Rome even kilometers from the Vatican off limits to private cars to ensure security for the estimated 16 Heads of State, seven Prime Ministers and five members of European royal houses attending.

 

 

Spain’s Crown Prince Felipe and Princess Letizia, wearing a black lace mantilla, mingled with Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, Poland’s historic Solidarity leader and former President Lech Walesa and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who sidestepped an EU travel ban to attend. “He went all over the world,” said Bishop Jean Zerbo of Bamako, Mali, who came to Rome for the ceremony. “Today, we’re coming to him.”

 

Pope Benedict put John Paul on the fast-track for possible sainthood when he dispensed with the traditional five-year waiting period and allowed the beatification process to begin weeks after his April 2, 2005, death. Pope Benedict was responding to chants of “Santo Subito!” or “Sainthood Immediately” which erupted during John Paul’s funeral.

 

On Sunday, a group of pilgrims from Krakow affixed a banner to a fence outside the square that says “Santo Subito,” evidence that for many of the faithful, John Paul already is a saint. “John Paul was a wonderful man and it’s a privilege to be here. It’s wonderful to see people from all across the world,” said Anne Honiball, 48, a nursing home administrator from Worthing, England who carried a small Union Jack flag.

 

 

“We missed the royal wedding but we are Catholics and this was a bit more important, I suppose,” said Ms. Honibal, a former Protestant who converted to Catholicism 10 years ago. Around the world, Catholics celebrated the beatification, jamming churches from Mexico to Australia to pray and watch broadcasts of the Rome Mass on television.

 

“He was a model and an inspiration who united the world with his extraordinary charisma,” said John Paul Bustillo, a 16-year-old medical student named after the pontiff who turned out on Sunday along with more than 3,000 for a 10-km race followed by a Mass near Manila Bay in the Philippines.

 

In John Paul’s native Poland, tens of thousands of people gathered in rain in a major sanctuary in Krakow and in Wadowice, where the pontiff was born in 1920 as Karol Wojtyla. Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his wife Malgorzata watched the ceremony together with Wadowice residents.

 

“I wonder what we would have been like and what would not have happened if we had not had our pope,” the PAP agency quoted Mr. Tusk as saying. “All that good that we all have received is still working.”

 

 

Speaking in Latin, Pope Benedict pronounced John Paul “Blessed” shortly after the start of the Mass, held under bright blue skies and amid a sea of Poland’s red and white flags — a scene reminiscent of John Paul’s 2005 funeral, when some 3 million people paid homage to the pope.

 

Pope Benedict recalled that day six years ago, saying the grief the world felt then was tempered by immense gratitude for his life and pontificate. “Even then, we perceived the fragrance of his sanctity,” Pope Benedict said, explaining the “reasonable haste” with which John Paul was being honoured.

 

Pope Benedict said that through John Paul’s faith, courage and strength — “the strength of a titan, a strength which came to him from God” — John Paul had turned back the seemingly “irreversible” tide of Marxism. “He rightly reclaimed for Christianity that impulse of hope which had in some sense faltered before Marxism and the ideology of progress,” Pope Benedict said.

 

 

Police, government officials and the Vatican all put the figure of those attending the Mass at over a million; only a few hundred thousand could fit into St. Peter’s Square and the surrounding streets but others watched it on some of the 14 huge TV screens set up around town or listened to it on radios in Polish or Italian.

 

“I am disappointed but also happy to be here for the atmosphere,” said Boleslaw Wisniewski, 83, who came with five members of his family by bus from Warsaw. He stood listening to the music drifting over the packed crowd, but could see nothing. “He’s our holy father — a Pole — and we are proud,” he said.

 

During the Mass, Pope Benedict received a silver reliquary holding a vial of blood taken from John Paul during his final hosptalisation. The relic, a key feature of beatification ceremonies, will be available for the faithful to venerate.

 

It was presented to him by Sister Tobiana, the Polish nun who tended to John Paul throughout his pontificate, and Sister Marie Simone-Pierre of France, whose inexplicable recovery from Parkinson’s disease was decreed to be the miracle necessary for John Paul to be beatified.

 

 

Helicopters flew overhead, police boats patrolled the nearby Tiber River and some 5,000 uniformed troops patrolled police barricades to ensure priests, official delegations and those with coveted VIP passes could get to their places.

 

Thousands of pilgrims, many of them from John Paul’s native Poland, spent the night in sleeping bags on bridges and in piazzas around town, and then packed St. Peter’s as soon as the barricades opened over an hour in advance because the crowds were too great.

 

They stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the main boulevard leading to the Vatican, Via della Conciliazione, as well as on side streets around it and the bridges crossing the Tiber leading to St. Peter’s.

 

It’s the fastest beatification on record, coming just six years after John Paul died and beating out the beatification of Mother Teresa by a few days.

- AP