Blessed John Paul II

The crowd in St. Peter’s Square during the beatification ceremony of John Paul II on 1 May 2011 [© Paolo Galosi]

Of the large crowd of believers – Romans and non-Romans – who on the day of the beatification of John Paul II crowded St Peter’s Square and the streets around, there remains to us the emotion, the veneration, the joy of all those people. And it is a memory that we mustn’t let fade in us. But also listening to the ritual proclamation by the voice of the person whom John Paul II declared his “trusted friend” was particularly moving, because what came back to mind were the words of Paul VI when he said that the secret to being a good pastor is novelty in continuity. And the first feature shared by John Paul II and Benedict XVI (but not always by all popes) is their ease in reaching the hearts of the people with words direct and simple enough to be comprehensible to ordinary people as well as to intellectuals.
I have great memories of John Paul II and I have happened in the past to speak of them at conferences and in interviews, but this time I want to cherish them in my heart, because on the occasion of his beatification one is in danger of making too much of oneself and not of the Blessed Wojtyla and that would be a serious mistake.
1 May 2011 also brought back the day of Pope John Paul II’s funeral on 8 April 2005: his dying days had been experienced by the whole world with extraordinary concern and the cry “Saint now” rose from the crowd, especially from the young, a cry which in the recent days of the beatification was heard very strongly again.
The Church has its own time and is totally autonomous, the procedures of the Congregation [of the Causes of the Saints ed.] are very strict and if media pressure is created one ends up with the opposite effect – though there is one aspect that I think important: the ascertaining of whether sanctity is felt by the faithful. And there is no doubt of that, so much so that many of the faithful address prayers to Pope John Paul II no less than if he were already a saint. The important thing is the substance, whether sanctity is recognized in a Christian figure and to whom prayers are addressed, the official stamp will come in its own time. I belong to an old school of Catholicism that teaches that we should love the pope, and not a pope. But I don’t think I’m veering from that line if I join those wanting a swift conclusion to the path to the altars that follows beatification, as it did for Mother Theresa and Padre Pio, for me the two most touching canonizations of the pontificate of Pope John Paul II.