John Paul II Beatified at Vatican Mass (Post #125)

Excerpt from The New York Times: John Paul II Beatified at Vatican Mass

VATICAN CITY — Lauding John Paul II as a giant of 20th-century history as well as a hero of the church, Pope Benedict XVI moved his towering predecessor one step closer to sainthood on Sunday in a celebratory Mass that drew more than a million people to Rome.

“He was witness to the tragic age of big ideologies, totalitarian regimes, and from their passing John Paul II embraced the harsh suffering, marked by tension and contradictions, of the transition of the modern age toward a new phase of history, showing constant concern that the human person be its protagonist,” Benedict said.

Benedict beatified John Paul II, declaring him “blessed,” meaning that he is able to be publicly venerated. He also greeted Sister Marie Simone-Pierre, a French nun who said that she recovered from Parkinson’s disease after praying to John Paul, a cure that Benedict had declared miraculous. An additional miracle is required for canonization, the next step after beatification.

Benedict praised John Paul for having carried out the vision of the liberalizing Second Vatican Council. “On a more personal note,” he added, “I would like to thank God for the gift of having worked for many years with blessed Pope John Paul II.”

Benedict inherited a sex abuse scandal that emerged in the final decade of John Paul’s reign, prompting some victims and critics to oppose the beatification or at least to question its speed, the fastest in modern times. Benedict waived the traditional five-year wait to begin the beatification process; it began just weeks after John Paul’s death.

But in spite of the scandal, for many, the late pope’s memory remains very real. “I miss him, so very much,” said Cristiana Arru, a lawyer from Rome who grew up near the Vatican and came often to see the pope celebrate Mass. Her eyes welled up with tears. “I still feel as though I’ve been orphaned.”
John Paul’s was a papacy of milestones. In 1978, as Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, Poland, he became the first non-Italian to become pope in four centuries. Under him, the church issued its first new catechism in nearly 500 years. In 2000, he asked pardon for the church’s sins against Jews, women, heretics and minorities. He was the first pope to visit a mosque and a synagogue.

He survived an assassination attempt by a Turkish gunman in 1981, a still-hazy chapter in cold war history with various theories about who might have been behind the attack. He later visited the gunman in prison and forgave him.

Lech Walesa, a Solidarity founder and a former Polish president, attended the Mass, as did Poland’s current president, Bronislaw Komorowski.

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, one of Africa’s longest-ruling autocrats, who was raised a Catholic, sat in the front row with his wife, Grace. President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, where John Paul had close ties, also attended, as did Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

Sources include
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/europe/02pope.html?ref=europe