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John Paul to Become a Saint?
by Peter Popham in Rome |
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14 May 2005
Pope Benedict XVI has announced that his predecessor, John Paul II, who died on 2 April, could become a saint in unusually quick time.
At the basilica of St John Lateran yesterday he told a gathering of priests based in Rome that the rule of waiting five years after a potential saint's death before the initial process of beatification can start was to be waived in the case of Karol Wojtyla, the first pope from Poland. The five-year rule had been introduced by John Paul himself in 1983, to check a bandwagon backing the former Hollywood actor Grace Kelly for beatification.
The campaign to declare John Paul a saint was gathering momentum even before he was interred. Prayers addressing him as "Santo Giovanni Paolo" were placed on a makeshift shrine around a lamppost in St Peter's Square in the days after his death, and midway through his funeral a forest of banners shot into the air, demanding "santo subito!" [make him a saint right now!]
Yesterday's announcement showed that those demands did not fall on deaf ears. But John Paul will not be made a saint by acclamation, as happened in the early days of the church. The development means merely that the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, a Vatican bureau led by Portugal's Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, will begin examining the case for beatifying John Paul immediately. Although several miracles have already been reported, the Congregation will need to agree on at least one and investigate it.