Pope Benedict XVI Beatifies John Paul II

May 01 2011           Jump To Discussion

VATICAN CITY – Some 1.5 million pilgrims flooded Rome Sunday to watch Pope John Paul II move a step closer to sainthood in one of the largest Vatican Masses in history.

The turnout for the beatification far exceeded even the most optimistic expectation of 1 million people, the number Rome city officials predicted. For Catholics filling St. Peter’s Square and its surrounding streets, and for those watching around the world the beatification was a welcome hearkening back to the days when the pope was almost universally beloved.

“He was like a king to us, like a father,” Marynka Ulaszewska, a 28-year-old from Ciechocinek, Poland, said, weeping. “I hope these emotions will remain with us for a long time,” she said.

Pope Benedict XVI praised John Paul for turning back the seemingly “irreversible” tide of communism with faith, courage and “the strength of a titan, a strength which came to him from God.”

John Paul is universally credited with helping bring down communism in his native Poland with support for the Solidarity labor movement, accelerating the fall of the Iron Curtain.

“He rightly reclaimed for Christianity that impulse of hope which had in some sense faltered before Marxism and the ideology of progress,” Benedict said. “He restored to Christianity its true face as a religion of hope.”

In Brazil, which has more Roman Catholics than any other nation, the beatification resonated among the faithful and sparked hope that it might renew faith in the church in the South American nation which is facing stiff competition for souls from evangelical Protestant movements.

“The beatification is going to renovate the faith of those who may have lost their way and left the church,” said Adimir Godoy, as he left a Sunday mass at the Santa Cecilia church in central Sao Paulo. “We were all blessed by the life of Pope John Paul and he deserves to be a saint.”

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.

The Pope’s coffin, which was exhumed on Friday from the crypts below St Peter’s Basilica, will ultimately be moved to a side chapel inside the basilica just next to Michelangelo’s famous marble “Pieta” statue.

 

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