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Television
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Preserve The Moment /
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114 - In
Memory:
John Paul
II,
b:1920- d: 2005
••
• VATICAN
CITY WEBSite --
• •
PopeCanonizationProcedures
• •
April 9, 2005 / VATICAN CITY -- Pope John
Paul II's funeral was barely underway when the
cardinals seated near his casket got the first
insistent message from the huge crowd below. "Santo
Subito," said the 15-foot banner unfurled in St.
Peter's Square.
• • Roughly translated from
Italian, it means "Sainthood
Now."
• • Soon an identical sign popped
up farther back in the crowd, followed by several
minutes of cheering, rhythmic applause and shouts
of "Saint John Paul!" By the end of the Mass, seven
such banners were visible from the outdoor altar,
each bearing the same slogan of a grass-roots
movement advocating the late Roman Catholic
leader's swift
sanctification.
• • "We all saw them," Cardinal
Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., said after
the service. "The message was clear. The people
think he was a saint."
• • Support for John Paul's
canonization "is like a tidal wave," said Cardinal
Adam Maida of Detroit. "It's going to
come."
• • Vatican officials cautioned
Friday that their procedure for elevating the dead
to saintly status was cumbersome and could last
decades. Any shortcuts, they said, would require a
decision by John Paul's successor, whom the
cardinals expect to elect this
month.
• • But in the meantime, a popular
cult of sainthood is burgeoning just a week after
the pope's death. Vendors in Rome, using the Polish
pontiff's given name, are selling T-shirts
proclaiming, "Saint Karol." Makeshift shrines have
sprung up near St. Peter's, attracting handwritten
notes referring in Christ-like terms to the pope's
long battle against a host of
infirmities.
• • "The people are way ahead of
the church on this," Father Henri Guglielo, a
parish priest from suburban Paris, said as he left
the funeral Mass.
• • Friday's pro-sainthood
demonstration showed some signs of organization and
looked strongest in a section of Polish pilgrims.
The "Santo Subito" banners were of identical size
and lettering, varying only in
color.
• • Yet the movement itself is
broad and seems primarily spontaneous, reflecting
the globe-trotting pontiff's contact with and
enduring effect on millions during his 26-year
reign.
• • "He is already a saint in our
hearts," said Elena Ramos, a black-clad Filipina,
as she filed out of the square Friday. "He always
was."
• • Seven time zones away in
Mexico, high school student Heron Badillo, 19, was
up at 3 a.m. to watch the funeral on TV. He met
John Paul 15 years ago when the pope landed in the
city of Zacatecas and blessed the sickly boy during
an airport ceremony.
• • In a telephone interview
Friday from Zacatecas, Badillo said he strongly
believed that the encounter cured him of leukemia
after doctors had given up treating him. "I felt an
instantaneous emotion and a new breath filling my
entire body," he said, adding that he was now free
of illness.
• • The Mexican Bishops Conference
backs his testimony. Spokeswoman Marilu Esponda
said the bishops planned to present it to the
Vatican, along with medical records, as evidence of
a miracle, even if that wasn't enough to put the
pope on the road to
canonization.
• • Candidates for sainthood must
pass through two rigorous examinations of documents
and eyewitness reports. The first leads to
beatification, the second to canonization.
Candidates must have proven reputations for
holiness and "intercessionary" powers to deliver
favors from God, as in a serious illness, to those
who pray to them.
• • The opening of a formal case
for beatification must wait at least five years
after the candidate's death, according to the
rules. But many Catholics would like to see that
period abolished for John Paul, and some of those
would rather that the next pope skip the
examination stages and simply proclaim him a
saint.
• • Father Peter Gumpel, a member
of the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of
Saints, said such a spur-of-the-moment proclamation
was unprecedented in recent centuries and would be
"imprudent."
• • Gumpel noted that Pope Paul VI
squelched a similar movement in the 1960s to
sanctify his predecessor, Pope John XXIII, right
away. It took John until 2000 to achieve
beatification.
• • Some canonization advocates
accept that approach. "He is a saint to me now, so
it doesn't matter to me what happens in the formal
way," said Pole Maciej Czapiewski at the funeral.
"Our pope doesn't want special treatment, and it
might be seen as being wrongly done to make him a
hero. This is not pop culture. The church is 2,000
years old."
• • In 1983, under John Paul's
guidance, beatification and canonization were
streamlined to let people become saints faster and
to offer Catholics a larger, more diverse group of
examples to follow. He canonized 482 people, more
than his predecessors in the last four centuries
combined, according to Vatican
statistics.
• • But some church officials
believe that the next pope might feel popular
pressure to move even quicker on John Paul's
beatification. The successor would have a precedent
in the late pontiff's speedy treatment of another
enormously popular religious personality, Mother
Teresa. Her beatification case started two years
after her death in 1997 and moved at record speed
to her sainthood in 2003.
• • "I think John Paul will also
be put on a fast track," said Cardinal Roger M.
Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles. "Everyone knows
the depth of this man's
spirituality."
• • Under the rules, John Paul
would need to perform one miracle for beatification
and one for sainthood. They would have to result
from prayers to him after his death, which means
that the Mexican boy's leukemia cure, even if
accepted by the Vatican as miraculous, wouldn't
count.
• • But the Mexican bishops will
present the case anyway, in the spirit that John
Paul deserves a loosening of the
process.
• • Other Catholics believe that
the church should stretch the definition of a
miracle. John Paul's evangelizing in Eastern
Europe, some note, played a role in toppling the
Berlin Wall.
• • "Absolutely, he should be
recognized as a saint as soon as possible," said
Paul Lipko, a Pole attending the Mass. "What about
all these people? Isn't this a
miracle?"• •
Sainted and blessed popes through the
ages
• • The campaign to declare the
late pontiff a saint has already been launched by
those calling John Paul II "the Great," an
honorific usually designated for popes worthy of
sainthood. Traditionally, at least five years must
elapse before a person can be considered for
beatification, which precedes canonization. Here is
a look at the reigns of every pope, and which ones
have been beatified or canonized.
Click
for more about the Pope Timeline and
Tomb
Main
Cover Page "The
Pope"
Page
02 - The Resting
Place
•
///
Respectfully
Troy
& Josie Cory
Publisher/Editor TVI Magazine
TVI Magazine,
tvinews.net, the Academy, Associated press,
Reuters, BBC, LA Times, NY Times and VRA's
D-Diaries were used in compiling and ascertaining
this news report.
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