{"id":819,"date":"2014-04-27T15:45:43","date_gmt":"2014-04-27T13:45:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stefanopitrelli.com\/?p=819"},"modified":"2015-10-25T22:39:42","modified_gmt":"2015-10-25T21:39:42","slug":"819","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stefanopitrelli.com\/?p=819","title":{"rendered":"Ancient Vatican ceremony makes saints of John Paul II and John XXIII"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Anthony Faiola &\u00a0Stefano Pitrelli<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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VATICAN CITY \u2014 In front of a sprawling sea of pilgrims fanning out from St. Peter\u2019s Square, Pope Francis on Sunday canonized John Paul II and John XXIII, bestowing sainthood on two towering figures of the 20th century who left outsize marks on the Roman Catholic Church.<\/em><\/article>\n<\/div>\n

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The hypnotic sounds of the Sistine Chapel Choir rang out across a throng\u00a0estimated at 800,000 faithful<\/a>\u00a0from the Vatican to beyond the Tiber River, where spillover crowds gathered before big screens. They watched as, for the first time in the church\u2019s history,\u00a0two popes were proclaimed saints at once<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In fact, Sunday\u2019s event was a tale of four popes, with\u00a0Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 who retired last year \u2014 present in the wings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In front of the imposing facade of St. Peter\u2019s Basilica, Francis, dressed in ivory robes, performed the somber rite with recitations and the sign of the cross, triggering a burst of applause.<\/p>\n

John\u00a0Paul\u00a0II remained fresher in the minds of many gathered here than John\u00a0XXIII, and it was his popularity in particular that appeared to be the biggest draw. At least 1,700\u00a0buses, 58\u00a0charter flights and five\u00a0trainloads of pilgrims arrived from Poland, the homeland of John Paul II, who, when elected pope in 1978, was the first non-Italian to sit on the throne of Saint Peter in 455 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people believe that saints are perfect, but rather than perfect, I believe that John Paul\u00a0II was heroic,\u201d said Lukasz \u00adPiotrowski, a 30-year-old from Krakow, Poland, who camped out with his newlywed wife to witness the event. He was one of thousands waving the red-and-white colors of the Polish flag. \u201cHe challenged communism, he changed Poland, and he changed history.\u201d<\/p>\n

By declaring both men saints on the same day, the crusading new pontiff \u2014 the first Latin American pope \u2014 had apparently set out to please both reformers and traditionalists.<\/p>\n

Born Karol Jozef Wojtyla in Wadowice, Poland, in 1920, John Paul II is seen as the first truly global pope, a charismatic conservative known for stirring oration and staring down communism even as he stood firmly against birth control and divorce.<\/p>\n

John XXIII, meanwhile, launched the sweeping reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s that saw the Catholic Mass, once said in Latin, switched to the common tongues of the faithful.<\/p>\n

In his words Sunday, Francis,\u00a0already solidly viewed as a reformer<\/a>\u00a013 months into his papacy, endorsed the spirit of Vatican II and the need to \u201cupdate and renovate\u201d the church.<\/p>\n

\u201cSaints are those who move the church forward and make it grow,\u201d the pope said, who at times sounded tired and was occasionally aided as he moved around and behind the altar.<\/p>\n

Without doubt, though,\u00a0Francis himself appeared to be an enormous draw. Katie Truso, a\u00a021-year-old Catholic-studies \u00adstudent from Minnesota who camped out overnight with a group of Americans to get a good perch, was young at the height of John\u00a0Paul\u00a0II\u2019s papacy. But she compared the excitement young Catholics were feeling about Francis to what it must have felt like to an older generation under John Paul\u00a0II.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like those days of JPII are back, you know, all that sense of excitement,\u201d Truso said. \u201cI think it was always there, but we had just forgotten what it was like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sunday\u2019s ceremony began at 10\u00a0a.m. in a light drizzle, with a procession, clouds of ritual \u00adincense and a religious litany rising from the square.<\/p>\n

Cardinal Angelo Amato, the Vatican\u2019s gatekeeper of saints, asked Francis three times for the canonization of the two popes, a gesture meant to signify the importance of the moment. After a reading from the pope, two reliquaries \u2014 vessels of silver, bronze and gold \u2014 were carried and placed to the left of the altar. One contained a vial of John Paul II\u2019s blood, the other a piece of John XXIII\u2019s skin taken from his exhumed body.<\/p>\n

The event brought together in death two men who in life were viewed as considerably different.<\/p>\n

Although the making of saints can take centuries, John Paul II\u2019s took a record nine years. The clamor for his sainthood began at his stirring funeral, where shouts rang out from mourners of \u201cSanto subito!\u201d (\u201cSainthood now!\u201d)<\/p>\n

On May 13, 1981, he survived an assassination attempt by a Turkish extremist whose 9mm bullets perforated his abdomen and intestines.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 1981, right after he was shot in St. Peter\u2019s Square, while on the ambulance, he quietly prayed for the shooter,\u201d said Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz of Krakow. \u201cHe didn\u2019t yet know who he was, but he had already forgiven him.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the man known as \u201cGod\u2019s Athlete\u201d for his vigor (he used to jog in the Vatican gardens) persevered, traveling the globe as no pope before him, filling stadiums and energizing Catholics from Rio de Janeiro to Warsaw. In the winter of his life, the world watched as he set an example, refusing to give in to Parkinson\u2019s disease and continuing his ministry even as his condition grew ever more acute.<\/p>\n

Yet amid Sunday\u2019s celebratory mood, a cloud remained. Accusations persist that John Paul\u00a0II neglected to respond swiftly to the revelations of widespread sexual abuse of children by Catholic clerics that began to emerge publicly during his papacy. In a letter published on the Web site of SNAP \u2014 the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests \u2014 a number of victims highlighted the \u201cgreat harm\u201d committed as \u201che turned a blind eye to clergy sexual crimes and cover-ups.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAt worst, he perpetuated and approved them,\u201d the signers said in their letter. \u201cFor him to now be given the highest honor in the church rubs even more salt into the already deep and still fresh wounds of thousands of struggling victims and millions of betrayed Catholics and victims.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although perhaps overshadowed by John Paul\u00a0II\u2019s fame, John XXIII\u2019s impact on the Roman Catholic Church may have been larger. He launched the Second Vatican Council that ushered in\u00a0broad reforms, encouraging \u00admore participation of the laity in church life, bringing guitar-playing folk singers into stodgy Masses and aiding the Vatican\u2019s often-rocky relations with other faiths.<\/p>\n

Like Francis, John XXIII, the son of Italian farmers, was viewed as an everyman\u2019s pope who spoke not in arcane terms but plainly and simply.<\/p>\n

One place where John XXIII, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli in 1881, remains exceedingly popular is Italy, where prayer cards and photos of the rotund \u201cGood Pope\u201d still abound in restaurants and taxis from Sicily to Milan. Although serving a global church, the good-natured pope was always seen as an Italian through and through \u2014 a man almost as liable to crack a joke as to pray.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen he died at 81, I did not watch an old man die, but a child,\u201d said Cardinal Loris Capovilla, John XXIII\u2019s former personal secretary. \u201cHe had a smile on his lips.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Anthony Faiola &\u00a0Stefano Pitrelli VATICAN CITY \u2014 In front of a sprawling sea of pilgrims fanning out from St. Peter\u2019s Square, Pope Francis on Sunday canonized John Paul II and John XXIII, bestowing sainthood on two towering figures of the 20th century who left outsize marks on the Roman Catholic Church.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15,48],"class_list":["post-819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-washpost","tag-religioni","tag-vaticano"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stefanopitrelli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stefanopitrelli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stefanopitrelli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stefanopitrelli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stefanopitrelli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=819"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.stefanopitrelli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":917,"href":"https:\/\/www.stefanopitrelli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819\/revisions\/917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stefanopitrelli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stefanopitrelli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stefanopitrelli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}