Perhaps ‘Saint John Paul the Great?'

Stephen Weeke NBC News Producer • E-mail

ROME — The first anniversary of the death of John Paul II seems to have come too soon for many people in Rome, partly because the sheer mass of the event left such a deep, and still fresh, mark on this city and its people. 

Both physically and psychologically, Rome embraces the Vatican like a big blanket, and treats it with a proprietary affection mixed with the deep respect for an elderly family member that is sometimes difficult, but always entitled to special status.

John Paul’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, though he was warmly welcomed, has yet to make himself completely at home in his white robes. That may explain why to the citizens of the Eternal City, and millions more around the world, the first image that comes to mind with the term “Il Papa,” is still that of Karol Wojtyla, of Krakow, Poland.

Death silenced crowd of thousands
At 9:37 p.m. on the evening of April 2, 2005, (a Saturday) Pope John Paul died in his apartment on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace. The announcement in Saint Peter’s Square a few minutes later hushed the large crowd that had been praying the rosary for him.

The square was unusually dark, and the quiet that would follow is described by many as being “other-worldly.” It’s not often that a hundred thousand people stand together in perfect silence.  

The days that followed that night would blend together as the biggest crowd ever assembled in the history of Rome.

Shoulder to shoulder, more than a million people would stand in line, around the clock, for a glimpse of John Paul’s body lying in state.  They stood through the night, asleep on their feet, to reach his side at Bernini’s Baldacchino, the solid bronze canopy that covers the main altar of Saint Peter’s basilica.

Statesmen and VIPs were brought in through a side door for a privileged peek, but that was the only concession to status.  The line of common people kept flowing by, it wasn’t stopped for the big-wigs, and that’s exactly how the Polish pope would have wanted it. Even in death he kept his special bond with the common people.

“He was a real human being that people could identify with,” said NBC consultant and theology professor Father Thomas Williams of the Legionnaires of Christ, remembering John Paul’s personal touch and incredible appeal.

“He was very warm, he was ‘with you,’ he wanted to be with people, and I think people miss that communication, they miss that heart that was reaching out to all of humanity as if to embrace all of humanity,” Williams said.

The ‘great’
Many of the regular folks from all walks of life who waited all those hours for that last look clearly felt that pull of humanity that John Paul represented, and many were already calling him a saint.

There were signs held up at the funeral mass presided by then Cardinal Ratzinger that said “Santo Subito!” Italian for “Saint right away!”

Other signs read “MAGNUS,” Latin for “great.” And indeed the breadth, depth and impact of such a massive papacy and visibly holy life, will probably see this man go down in history as “Saint John Paul the Great.”

For an institution that took several centuries to forgive Galileo for pointing out that our world wasn’t the center of the universe, the Vatican is moving at the speed of light in the “cause” for sainthood of John Paul II.

On May 13^th last year, the anniversary date of when John Paul was shot by a Turkish gunman in 1981, Benedict set the sainthood process in motion by suspending the five-year waiting period mandated by the church between the death of a person and the opening of the “cause.” 

That rule was established precisely to prevent “sainthood by acclamation” which had been common in the Middle Ages. The church believes that the flood of emotion that swept crowds at the death of someone they considered holy led to many “emotional” canonizations of people who, on closer scrutiny, weren’t really all that holy to begin with.

Proving that even at the Vatican the rules can be broken, (if it’s the pope that’s breaking them), Benedict agreed that in this case the crowd was right, and the voice of the people was heard.

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