Scottish Catholic Observer

Pope Benedict XVI has said that he is ‘joyfully’ anticipating Beatifying Pope John Paul II next month.

While preaching the angelus last Sunday, the Holy Father told pilgrims the sixth anniversary of his predecessor’s death was a time to remember him.

“While, through our Lenten journey, we prepare for the feast of Easter, we are also joyfully approaching the day when we will venerate as Blessed this great witness of Christ and Pope [John Paul II], and rely even more on his intercession,” Pope Benedict XVI said. “John Paul II will be Beatified on May 1 next, the Second Sunday of Easter and Feast of Divine Mercy, a festivity greatly desired by the late Pope.”

Because of the impending Beatification, Pope Benedict did not celebrate a memorial Mass for his predecessor last Sunday, ‘but I fondly remembered him in prayer, as I think all of you also did.’

Faith, hope and love

A senior cardinal also praised the late Pope last weekend saying he was being Beatified not because of his impact on history or on the Catholic Church, but because of the way he lived the Christian virtues of faith, hope and love.

Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes told a conference at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome that the beatification process for Pope John Paul II had been through.

“Clearly his cause was put on the fast track, but the process was done carefully and meticulously, following the rules Pope John Paul himself issued in 1983,” the cardinal said.

He added that the church wanted to respond positively to many Catholics’ hopes to have Pope John Paul beatified quickly, but it also wanted to be certain that the Pope, who died in 2005, is in Heaven.

Consensus

Cardinal Amato said the sainthood process is one of the areas of Church life where the consensus of Church members, technically the sensus fidelium (sense of the Faithful), really counts.

“From the day of his death on April 2, 2005, the people of God began proclaiming his holiness, and hundreds, if not thousands, visit his tomb each day,” the cardinal said. A further sign is the number of biographies published about him and the number of his writings that are translated and re-published.

“In the course of a Beatification cause, there is the vox populi,” he said, which must be ‘accompanied by the vox dei (voice of God)—the miracles—and the vox ecclesiae (voice of the church),’ which is the official judgment issued after interviewing eyewitnesses and consulting with historians, physicians, theologians and church leaders to verify the candidate’s holiness.

Beatification and Canonisation are not recognitions of someone’s superior understanding of theology, nor of the great works he or she accomplished, he said. Declaring someone a saint, the Church attests to the fact that he or she lived the Christian virtues in a truly extraordinary way and is a model to be imitated by others, the cardinal said.

The candidate, he said, must be perceived ‘as an image of Christ.’

Cardinal Amato noted that ‘the pressure of the public and of the media did not disturb the process, but helped it’ because it was a further sign of Pope John Paul’s widespread reputation for holiness, which is something the Church requires proof of before it moves to Beatify someone.

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