Vatican ceremony puts John Paul II on the fast track to sainthood
Tuesday, 3 April 2007
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Two years to the day after his death, the Catholic Church has wrapped up the first stage of Pope John Paul II's ascent to the company of saints.
In an ancient ceremony at the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano, founded by the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, three black leather trunks full of witness statements and writings by and about the late pope were ritually bound with ribbon and sealed with wax. The trunks will be opened and their contents examined by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
The Polish pope is hurrying to sainthood faster than any figure in recent history. His successor Benedict XVI waived the normal five-year waiting period, putting him on the path to sainthood just two months after his death, a full year sooner than the process for the previous record holder, John Paul II's close friend Mother Teresa.
The ceremony was followed in the evening by a solemn mass in St Peter's Square, presided over by Benedict XVI and in the presence of Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre, the French nun who attributes her apparently miraculous cure of Parkinson's disease to the intercession of the late pope. One attested miracle is required for a beatification, and an additional one for canonisation.
Benedict XVI, who was John Paul II's "enforcer of the faith" for more than two decades, devoted his sermon at the Mass to his late boss's memory. He recalled the incident in St John's Gospel in which Mary of Bethany anoints the feet of Jesus with costly oil so that the perfume "filled the whole house". The perfume of the love of John Paul II, said Benedict XVI, "filled all the Church ... his pontificate was marked by his prodigality ... he expended himself generously, without holding anything back".
The men forcing the pace of John Paul II's sainthood are Cardinal Camillo Ruini, Vicar of Rome, and until recently head of the Italian Episcopal Conference, and Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul II's secretary for decades and now Archbishop of Krakow. At the Mass yesterday morning, Cardinal Ruini described John Paul II as "a man of concrete and radical poverty. He lived in poverty, in a spontaneous, unforced way, it seemed he needed nothing, he was totally detached from money and from possessions." Cardinal Dziwisz told reporters: "We're not in a hurry, we must do our work well." But he added: "I call [John Paul II] a saint and [Pope Benedict XVI] calls him a saint. Everybody declares him to be a saint, but now we await the process of public announcement." Speed apart, John Paul II is following the same well-trodden path as all his modern predecessors, from the charismatic and much-loved John XXIII (died 1963) via Pius XII (died 1958), known as "the angelic pastor" (though subsequently steeped in controversy on account of his attitude to the Nazis and the Holocaust), to Pope Pius IX (died 1878) whose tomb in Rome receives few, if any, pilgrims.
Robert Mickens, Vatican correspondent for The Tablet, said: "There's a personal morality that characterises the popes of the last century, they did not father large numbers of children or do other bad things - but were they all saints? The fact is that the Church has not figured out another way to honour people. Some people in the Vatican are nervous about this rush to canonise John Paul II. He was a great pope in the sense that he was huge on the world stage. And in the minds of a lot of people he is still pope.
"And that's one reason why, in my view, they should take longer and let all this fervour die down. If he is really a saint, then in 50 years they will know because there will be a popular cult around his name."
