RITE OF BEATIFICATION, PROCLAMATION AND HOMILY TODAY IN ROME

In Heaven, he looks after us.

RITE OF BEATIFICATION

VATICAN CITY, 1 MAY 2011 (VIS) – Following the penitential act of the Mass
of Beatification, Cardinal Agostino Vallini, Vicar General of the Pontiff
for the Diocese of Rome, joined Benedict XVI, along with the postulator for
the cause of beatification, Msgr. Slawomir Oder, and asked that the
beatification of the Servant of God, John Paul II, might proceed:

Beatissime Pater,
Vicarius Generalis Sanctitatis Vestrae
pro Romana Dioecesi,
humillime a Sanctitate Vestra petit
ut Venerabilem Servum Dei
Ioannem Paulum II, papam,
numero Beatorum adscribere
benignissime digneris.
(Most blessed Father, Your Holiness’ Vicar General for the Diocese for Rome
humbly asks your Holiness to beneficently deign to inscribe the Venerable
Servant of God John Paul II in the number of the Blessed.)

He then read a brief biography of the Polish Pontiff:

Karol Józef Wojtyla was born in the Polish town of Wadowice on 18 May 1920
to Karol and Emilia Kaczorowska. He was baptized on 20 June of that year in
Wadowice’s parish church.

The second of two children, the joy and serenity of his childhood was
shaken by the premature death of his mother when Karol was nine (1929).
Three years later, in 1932, his older brother Edmund also died and then in
1941, when he was 21, he also lost his father.

Brought up in a solid patriotic and religious tradition, he learned from
his father, a deeply Christian man, piety and love for one’s neighbor, which
he nourished with constant prayer and participation in the sacraments.

The characteristics of his spirituality, to which he remained faithful
until his death, were a sincere devotion to the Holy Spirit and love for the
Madonna. His relationship with the Mother of God was particularly deep and
vibrant, lived with the tenderness of a child who abandons himself to his
mother’s embrace and with the vigor of a gallant, always ready for his
lady’s command: “Do what my Son asks!” His complete trust in Mary, which as
a bishop he expressed with the motto Totus tuus, also reveals his secret of
looking at the world with the eyes of the Mother of God.

Young Karol’s rich personality matured with the interweaving of his
intellectual, moral, and spiritual gifts with the events of his day, which
marked the history of his country and of Europe.

During the years of his secondary education, a passion for theatre and
poetry grew in him, which he cultivated in the theatrical group of the
Faculty of Philology at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University where he was
enrolled during the 1938 academic year.

During the period of Nazi occupation of Poland, together with his studies
that he carried on in secret, he spent four years (October 1940 to August
1944) working in the Solvay chemical factory, directly encountering the
social problems of the working world and gathering the precious wealth of
experience that he was able to draw upon in his future social teachings,
first as Archbishop of Krakow and subsequently as Supreme Pontiff.

Throughout these years his inclination towards the priesthood developed, a
path he furthered by attending clandestine courses in theology at the
Seminary of Krakow from October of 1942. He was assisted greatly in
recognizing his priestly vocation by a lay man, Jan Tyranowski, a true
apostle of youth. From then on the young Karol had a clear understanding of
the universal call to holiness of all Christians, and the fundamental role
of the laity in the mission of the Church.

He received priestly ordination on 1 November 1946 and the day after, in
the evocative atmosphere of the crypt of St. Leonard in the cathedral of
Wawel, he celebrated his first Mass.

He was sent to Rome to complete his theological formation at the Faculty
of Theology of the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum),
where he was immersed in the source of sound doctrine, having his first
encounter with the vibrancy and richness of the Universal Church from the
privileged position of life on the other side of the ‘Iron Curtain’. At
around this time he met with Padre Pio of Pietrelcina.

After graduating with highest honors in June of 1948, he returned to
Krakow to begin his pastoral duties as a parish vicar. He undertook his
ministry with enthusiasm and generosity. After obtaining his university
teaching qualification, he began teaching in the Faculty of Theology at the
Jagiellonian University then, when that faculty was closed, in the diocesan
Seminary of Krakow and the Catholic University of Lublin.

The years he spent in the company of young students enabled him to gain a
profound understanding of the restlessness of their hearts and the young
priest was a not only a teacher for them, but also a spiritual guide and
friend.

At the age of 38 he was appointed as auxiliary bishop of Krakow. On 28
September 1958, he was ordained a bishop by Archbishop Eugeniusz Baziak,
whom he succeeded as archbishop of Krakow in 1964. He was created a cardinal
by Pope Paul VI on 26 June 1967.

As bishop of the Diocese of Krakow, he was immediately appreciated as a
man of robust and courageous faith, close to the people and aware of the
real problems they faced.

He was an interlocutor capable of listening and of dialogue without ever
conceding to compromise. He affirmed to all the primacy of God and of Christ
as the foundation for a true humanism and the source of inalienable human
rights. Beloved by his priests and esteemed by his brother bishops, he was
also feared by those who regarded him as an adversary.

On 16 October 1978 he was elected Bishop and Pontiff of Rome and took the
name of John Paul II. His shepherd’s heart, entirely given over to the cause
of the Kingdom of God, was opened to the entire world. “Christ’s love” led
him to visit the parishes of Rome and to announce the Gospel in all places.
It was the driving force for his innumerable apostolic visits to various
continents, undertaken to confirm his Christian brothers and sisters in the
faith, to comfort the afflicted and the discouraged, to bring the message of
reconciliation between Christian faiths, and to build bridges of friendship
between believers in the one God and all of good will.

His illustrious teachings focused on nothing other than proclaiming
Christ, the sole Savior of humanity, always and everywhere.

In his extraordinary missionary zeal, he had a particular love for the
young. He envisioned the World Youth Day gatherings with the objective of
announcing Jesus Christ and his Gospel to the new generations in order to
enable them to actively shape their future and to co-operate in building a
better world.

His solicitude as universal Shepherd was demonstrated in the convocation
of numerous assemblies of the Synods of Bishops, the erection of dioceses
and ecclesiastical circumscriptions, in the promulgation of the Codes of
Canon Law for the Latin and Eastern Churches and the catechism of the
Catholic Church, and in the publication of encyclical letters and apostolic
exhortations. In order to promote occasions for a more intense spiritual
life for the People of God, he proclaimed the extraordinary Jubilee of
Redemption, the Marian Year, the Year of the Eucharist, and the Great
Jubilee of 2000.

John Paul II had lived through the tragic experience of two dictatorships,
survived an assassination attempt on 13 May 1981 and, in his later years,
suffered grave physical hardship due to the progression of his illness.
However, his overwhelming optimism, based on his trust in divine Providence,
drove him to constantly look to horizons of hope, inviting people to break
down the walls between them, to brush aside passivity in order to attain the
goals of spiritual, moral and material renewal.

He concluded his long and fruitful earthly existence in the Vatican
Apostolic Palace on Saturday, 2 April 2005, the vigil of the Second Sunday
of Easter (Dominica in Albis), which he entitled the Sunday of Divine Mercy.
The funeral was held in St. Peter’s Square on 8 April 2005.

A touching testimony of the good he brought about during his life was seen
by the participation of delegations from all over the world and of millions
of men and women, believers and non-believers alike, who recognized in him a
clear sign of God’s love for humanity.

Cardinal Vallini concluded by thanking the Pope with the following words:

Beatissime Pater,
Vicarius Sanctitatis Vestrae
pro Romana Dioecesi,
gratias ex animo Sanctitati Vestrae agit
quod titulum Beati
hodie
Venerabili Servo Dei
Ioanni Paulo II, papae
Conferre dignatus es.
(Most Blessed Father, the Vicar General of His Holiness for the Diocese of
Rome gives heartfelt thanks to Your Holiness for conferring the title of
Blessed to the venerable Servant of God, Pope John Paul II.)
…/ VIS 20110501
(1470)

BENEDICT PROCLAIMS JOHN PAUL II A BLESSED

VATICAN CITY, 1 MAY 2011 (VIS) – At 10:00am this morning, the Second Sunday
of Easter of Divine Mercy Sunday, Benedict XVI presided over the Eucharistic
celebration during which Servant of God John Paul II, Pope (1920-2005) was
proclaimed a Blessed, and whose feastday will be celebrated 22 October every
year from now on.

Eighty-seven delegations from various countries, among which were 5 royal
houses, 16 heads of state – including the presidents of Poland and Italy –
and 7 prime ministers, attended the ceremony.

Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world filled St. Peter’s
Square and the streets adjacent. The ceremony could also be followed on the
various giant screens installed in Circo Massimo and various squares around
the city.

The text of the Pope’s homily follows:

“Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Six years ago we gathered in this Square to celebrate the funeral of Pope
John Paul II. Our grief at his loss was deep, but even greater was our sense
of an immense grace which embraced Rome and the whole world: a grace which
was in some way the fruit of my beloved predecessor’s entire life, and
especially of his witness in suffering. Even then we perceived the fragrance
of his sanctity, and in any number of ways God’s People showed their
veneration for him. For this reason, with all due respect for the Church’s
canonical norms, I wanted his cause of beatification to move forward with
reasonable haste. And now the longed-for day has come; it came quickly
because this is what was pleasing to the Lord: John Paul II is blessed!

I would like to offer a cordial greeting to all of you who on this happy
occasion have come in such great numbers to Rome from all over the world –
cardinals, patriarchs of the Eastern Catholic Churches, brother bishops and
priests, official delegations, ambassadors and civil authorities,
consecrated men and women and lay faithful, and I extend that greeting to
all those who join us by radio and television.

Today is the Second Sunday of Easter, which Blessed John Paul II entitled
Divine Mercy Sunday. The date was chosen for today’s celebration because, in
God’s providence, my predecessor died on the vigil of this feast. Today is
also the first day of May, Mary’s month, and the liturgical memorial of
Saint Joseph the Worker. All these elements serve to enrich our prayer, they
help us in our pilgrimage through time and space; but in heaven a very
different celebration is taking place among the angels and saints! Even so,
God is but one, and one too is Christ the Lord, who like a bridge joins
earth to heaven. At this moment we feel closer than ever, sharing as it were
in the liturgy of heaven.

‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’ (Jn
20:29). In today’s Gospel Jesus proclaims this beatitude: the beatitude of
faith. For us, it is particularly striking because we are gathered to
celebrate a beatification, but even more so because today the one proclaimed
blessed is a Pope, a Successor of Peter, one who was called to confirm his
brethren in the faith. John Paul II is blessed because of his faith, a
strong, generous and apostolic faith. We think at once of another beatitude:
‘Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed
this to you, but my Father in heaven’ (Mt 16:17). What did our heavenly
Father reveal to Simon? That Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.
Because of this faith, Simon becomes Peter, the rock on which Jesus can
build his Church. The eternal beatitude of John Paul II, which today the
Church rejoices to proclaim, is wholly contained in these sayings of Jesus:
‘Blessed are you, Simon’ and ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet
have come to believe!’ It is the beatitude of faith, which John Paul II also
received as a gift from God the Father for the building up of Christ’s
Church.

Our thoughts turn to yet another beatitude, one which appears in the
Gospel before all others. It is the beatitude of the Virgin Mary, the Mother
of the Redeemer. Mary, who had just conceived Jesus, was told by Saint
Elizabeth: ‘Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of
what was spoken to her by the Lord’ (Lk 1:45). The beatitude of faith has
its model in Mary, and all of us rejoice that the beatification of John Paul
II takes place on this first day of the month of Mary, beneath the maternal
gaze of the one who by her faith sustained the faith of the Apostles and
constantly sustains the faith of their successors, especially those called
to occupy the Chair of Peter. Mary does not appear in the accounts of
Christ’s resurrection, yet hers is, as it were, a continual, hidden
presence: she is the Mother to whom Jesus entrusted each of his disciples
and the entire community. In particular we can see how Saint John and Saint
Luke record the powerful, maternal presence of Mary in the passages
preceding those read in today’s Gospel and first reading. In the account of
Jesus’ death, Mary appears at the foot of the Cross (Jn 19:25), and at the
beginning of the Acts of the Apostles she is seen in the midst of the
disciples gathered in prayer in the Upper Room (Acts 1:14).

Today’s second reading also speaks to us of faith. St. Peter himself,
filled with spiritual enthusiasm, points out to the newly-baptized the
reason for their hope and their joy. I like to think how in this passage, at
the beginning of his First Letter, Peter does not use language of
exhortation; instead, he states a fact. He writes: ‘you rejoice’, and he
adds: ‘you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in
him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are
receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls’ (1 Pt 1:6,
8-9). All these verbs are in the indicative, because a new reality has come
about in Christ’s resurrection, a reality to which faith opens the door.
‘This is the Lord’s doing’, says the Psalm (Ps 118:23), and ‘it is marvelous
in our eyes’, the eyes of faith.

Dear brothers and sisters, today our eyes behold, in the full spiritual
light of the risen Christ, the beloved and revered figure of John Paul II.
Today his name is added to the host of those whom he proclaimed saints and
blesseds during the almost twenty-seven years of his pontificate, thereby
forcefully emphasizing the universal vocation to the heights of the
Christian life, to holiness, taught by the conciliar Constitution on the
Church, Lumen Gentium. All of us, as members of the people of God – bishops,
priests, deacons, laity, men and women religious – are making our pilgrim
way to the heavenly homeland where the Virgin Mary has preceded us,
associated as she was in a unique and perfect way to the mystery of Christ
and the Church. Karol Wojtyla took part in the Second Vatican Council, first
as an auxiliary Bishop and then as Archbishop of Krakow. He was fully aware
that the Council’s decision to devote the last chapter of its Constitution
on the Church to Mary meant that the Mother of the Redeemer is held up as an
image and model of holiness for every Christian and for the entire Church.
This was the theological vision which Blessed John Paul II discovered as a
young man and subsequently maintained and deepened throughout his life. A
vision which is expressed in the scriptural image of the crucified Christ
with Mary, his Mother, at his side. This icon from the Gospel of John
(19:25-27) was taken up in the episcopal and later the papal coat-of-arms of
Karol Wojtyla: a golden cross with the letter ‘M’ on the lower right and the
motto ‘Totus tuus’, drawn from the well-known words of Saint Louis Marie
Grignion de Montfort in which Karol Wojtyla found a guiding light for his
life: ‘Totus tuus ego sum et omnia mea tua sunt. Accipio te in mea omnia.
Praebe mihi cor tuum, Maria – I belong entirely to you, and all that I have
is yours. I take you for my all. O Mary, give me your heart’ (Treatise on
True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, 266).

In his Testament, the new Blessed wrote: ‘When, on 16 October 1978, the
Conclave of Cardinals chose John Paul II, the Primate of Poland, Cardinal
Stefan Wyszynski, said to me: “The task of the new Pope will be to lead the
Church into the Third Millennium”‘. And the Pope added: ‘I would like once
again to express my gratitude to the Holy Spirit for the great gift of the
Second Vatican Council, to which, together with the whole Church – and
especially with the whole episcopate – I feel indebted. I am convinced that
it will long be granted to the new generations to draw from the treasures
that this Council of the twentieth century has lavished upon us. As a Bishop
who took part in the Council from the first to the last day, I desire to
entrust this great patrimony to all who are and will be called in the future
to put it into practice. For my part, I thank the Eternal Shepherd, who has
enabled me to serve this very great cause in the course of all the years of
my Pontificate’. And what is this ’cause’? It is the same one that John Paul
II presented during his first solemn Mass in Saint Peter’s Square in the
unforgettable words: ‘Do not be afraid! Open, open wide the doors to
Christ!’ What the newly-elected Pope asked of everyone, he was himself the
first to do: society, culture, political and economic systems he opened up
to Christ, turning back with the strength of a titan – a strength which came
to him from God – a tide which appeared irreversible. By his witness of
faith, love and apostolic courage, accompanied by great human charisma, this
exemplary son of Poland helped believers throughout the world not to be
afraid to be called Christian, to belong to the Church, to speak of the
Gospel. In a word: he helped us not to fear the truth, because truth is the
guarantee of liberty. To put it even more succinctly: he gave us the
strength to believe in Christ, because Christ is Redemptor hominis, the
Redeemer of man. This was the theme of his first encyclical, and the thread
which runs though all the others.

When Karol Wojtyla ascended to the throne of Peter, he brought with him a
deep understanding of the difference between Marxism and Christianity, based
on their respective visions of man. This was his message: man is the way of
the Church, and Christ is the way of man. With this message, which is the
great legacy of the Second Vatican Council and of its ‘helmsman’, the
Servant of God Pope Paul VI, John Paul II led the People of God across the
threshold of the Third Millennium, which thanks to Christ he was able to
call ‘the threshold of hope’. Throughout the long journey of preparation for
the great Jubilee he directed Christianity once again to the future, the
future of God, which transcends history while nonetheless directly affecting
it. He rightly reclaimed for Christianity that impulse of hope which had in
some sense faltered before Marxism and the ideology of progress. He restored
to Christianity its true face as a religion of hope, to be lived in history
in an ‘Advent’ spirit, in a personal and communitarian existence directed to
Christ, the fullness of humanity and the fulfillment of all our longings for
justice and peace.

Finally, on a more personal note, I would like to thank God for the gift
of having worked for many years with Blessed Pope John Paul II. I had known
him earlier and had esteemed him, but for twenty-three years, beginning in
1982 after he called me to Rome to be Prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, I was at his side and came to revere him all the
more. My own service was sustained by his spiritual depth and by the
richness of his insights. His example of prayer continually impressed and
edified me: he remained deeply united to God even amid the many demands of
his ministry. Then too, there was his witness in suffering: the Lord
gradually stripped him of everything, yet he remained ever a ‘rock’, as
Christ desired. His profound humility, grounded in close union with Christ,
enabled him to continue to lead the Church and to give to the world a
message which became all the more eloquent as his physical strength
declined. In this way he lived out in an extraordinary way the vocation of
every priest and bishop to become completely one with Jesus, whom he daily
receives and offers in the Eucharist.

Blessed are you, beloved Pope John Paul II, because you believed!
Continue, we implore you, to sustain from heaven the faith of God’s people.
How many time you blessed us from this very square. Holy Father, bless us
again from that window. Amen”.
HML/ VIS
20110501 (2200)