CEBU CITY — “We stood next to John Paul II when our choir sang at the canonization for Lorenzo Ruiz,” . our former maid from Cebu exuberantly wrote us. Tering opted to remain in Rome when the UN Food and Agriculture reassigned us to Thailand.
Her bubbly excitement is seen in today’s crowds, gathering in Rome, for May 1 beatification of the Polish pontiff .The Filipino Karilagan Choir will sing Aba Ginoong Maria and “One More Gift” at a Circo Massimo concert.
Was it only yesterday when the world watched JPII’s body interred, in Vatican crypt, as people in San Pietro Piazza chanted: Santo Subito ( “Declare him saint now!”)?
Beatification is a step before sainthood. The process authorizes veneration of the person called “blessed in their home countries. After 1 May, Catholics in Poland and in Rome will honor “Blessed John Paul II” every 22 October.
“Beatification is not a score card or a management audit”. Yet, it is hard to resist tallying milestones in. JPII’s remarkable life, from seminarian in a Nazi-repressed Poland to the 264th successor of Peter.
He streamlined the canonization process in 1983. For example, the “Devil’s advocate” — an official whose job skewer every candidate was to sainthood – was eliminated. “The idea was to lift up contemporary role models of holiness.”
Thus, he beatified 1,340 individuals, including Pedro Calungsod of Ginatilan, Cebu in 2000. He canonized Lorenzo Ruiz of Binondo and 482 others as saints. That’s more than the combined tally of his predecessors during the last five centuries.
Multi-lingual, the peripatetic pope visited 129 countries, including the Philippines in 1981 and 1987. Jitters that the “Conjugal Dictatorship” then would “hijack” John Paul’s first visit were quickly laid to rest.
He gently turned down Imelda Marcos’ insistent invitation to lodge in the glitzy Coconut Palace, preferring the Spartan nunciature. In his address to an unblinking Ferdinand Marcos, he underscored government’s duty to safeguard human rights. He reiterated that theme, in Bacolod, on behalf of exploited sacada workers in sugar plantations. “This is war”, fumed a notorious sugar baron.
Six years later, he rocked with youngsters at the Tenth World Youth Day celebrations at the Luneta that drew around five million. “Some suggest this was the largest Christian gathering ever.”
“One felt something authentically human about this smiling man who… treated the world as his parish,” wrote Dr Melba Padilla Maggay of the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture. “Yet there was, in this Pope, a rocklike intransigence, that baffles those warmed by his passion for social reform but turn cold stiff at the hardline conservatism of his theology…
Tomorrow, Benedict XVI will preside at centuries-old rites with a 21st century twist. He will be first of 265 popes to beatify his immediate predecessor. This is “the swiftest ascension toward sainthood on record,” New York Times notes.
There’s no argument that John Paul towers. He was inspiring in the way he went to Rebbedia Prison in Rome to embrace and forgive Ali Agca who shot and nearly killed him, the Guardian notes.
He helped t bring down communism, and lent courage to Poland in defying the Soviet Union, ,” the New York Times adds.. John Paul presciently critiqued capitalism’s hunger for profit at any cost.
Not everyone agrees. “Years from now people may be saying, why the rush?” Jesuit priest Father James Martin told the Guardian. Maureen Dowd of New York Times faults his slow reaction to priest pedophiles.
There are institutional factors that signal JPII could be fast-tracked for canonization, writes John Allen Jr of National Catholic Reporter for BBC.
“As the 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas taught, ( the church ) is not exempt from the normal realities of human nature – including the laws of psychology, sociology, and even politics.
There is a popular grassroots conviction that John Paul was a holy man. An exhaustive four volume study documents a life of “heroic virtue” A 49-year-old French nun from Parkinson’s disease, the same affliction from which the late pope suffered, has been inexplicably healed. “All traditional criteria have been met”.
Among other things, “fast-track factors”, according to Allen, may involve “a first”. Nicaraguan Sr Maria Romero Meneses is the first blessed from Central America. Italian lay woman Maria Corsini, along with husband Luigi Beltrame Quattrocchi is the first blessed married couple. (Will the French parents of St Therese of Lisiuex follow soon? )
Or a political or cultural issue is attached to the cause. For instance, Italian lay woman like Gianna Beretta Molla refused to have an abortion to save her life.
Candidates, like St Josemaria Escriva, had an organization, like Opus Dei that had political savvy and resources to move the ball.
Or they may have, as in the case of Chiara Badano, a lay member of the Focolare movement, overwhelming support from bishops of the region. . “Focolare is admired for its spirituality of unity and its ecumenical and inter-faith efforts…”
Then, Church officials may feel a personal interest in a cause. Michal Sopocko was, confessor of St Faustina Kowalska, a mystic and founder of the Divine Mercy devotion. Jerzy Popieluszko was a Solidarity leader murdered by the Polish Communists The process of these two Polish priests moved swiftly under John Paul.
“John Paul …saw good and evil as real and distinct, not woolly abstractions,” Dr Maggay wrote. “His visits to many countries were virtual epiphanies. In a world bereft of transcendence, he gave what sociologist Emile Durkheim calls “times of effervescence” — bubbling luminous joy when we come face to face with something authentically touched by the holy”. That’s what our maid Tering meant.
