Express lane

Multiple “historical firsts” explain why all roads lead to Rome on April 27—where all hotels have been booked solid. Institutions like Pontifico Collegio Filipino on Via Aurelia are similarly crammed. Pope Francis will declare on that day Popes John XXIII and John Paul II as saints.

It will be the first double papal canonization in two millennia. Rites have been simplified.

“Sobriety is the order of the day,” Italian daily La Stampa reported. There’ll be a prayer vigil in 11 Rome churches the night before. Tapestries to be used are from the prior beatifications. “The low-frills style of Pope Francis is having an effect,” notes Associated Press.

Only 250,000 can cram into Piazza di San Pietro and Via della Conciliazone. Thus, giant screens have been set up in Rome and provision made for the world press. The two women whose healing are attributed to John Paul II’s intercession will be present.

Will Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI attend the rites? He became the first pontiff to resign since 1415 A.D. when Pope Gregory stood down to avoid schism. If he does, two living and two deceased popes will figure in one historic ceremony.

Francis splices in one ceremony two schools of thought on what a pope should be. A simple parish priest figure like Angelo Roncali of Italy and a globe-trotting superstar like Karol Wojtyla of Poland. It’s “a masterstroke that’s already stirred dissent,” Agence France Presse reports.

“Reform the church?” asked then Archbishop Angelo Roncalli. “Is such a thing possible?” He was the son of Italian sharecroppers who couldn’t afford the bus fare to his ordination. But in 1958, the nearly 77-year-old Roncalli was elected by wary cardinals who pegged him a transition pope.

Humor has always been handmaid of sanctity. “Anybody can be pope,” Roncalli joshed. “The proof is I’ve become one.” Asked how many people worked in the Vatican, he deadpanned, “About half of them.” In his Hospital of the Holy Spirit visit, the flustered mother superior introduced herself. “Holy Father,” she said, “I’m the superior of the Holy Spirit.” You’re very lucky,” was the reply. “I’m only the vicar of Christ.”

As John XXIII, Roncalli stunned many by calling out: Apertura a sinistra. “Open the windows and let the fresh air in.” Few foresaw that the Second Vatican Council, which he convened would jolt a sclerotic church to its founding fervor.

John XXIII died in 1963 before the Council ended. What emerged recast the church as the “People of God, with full participation of all the baptized, yet always in need of reform.” Council advisor Father Joseph Ratzinger defined this as perennis reformatio. He repeated that theme as Benedict XVI.

Vatican II reached out to other faiths and built bridges to a world hurtling into a digital age. It asserted its “prophetic role”, smudged by cozy accommodation with assorted dictators.

“I have the bishops by their balls,” Ferdinand Marcos scoffed before Pope John Paul II came to the Philippines in January 1981. Marcos touted the cosmetic lifting of martial law. Imelda decked out the Coconut Palace for the pontiff. But John Paul politely declined and lodged instead at the sparse nunciature in Pasay City.

“Even in exceptional conditions… the state cannot claim to serve the common good when human rights are not safeguarded,” John Paul II told a pokerfaced Marcos and cronies in his Jan. 17, 1981 speech at Malacañang Palace.

Then, he went on to Luneta where he beatified now St. Lorenzo Ruiz, then flew to Bacolod. There, he pressed for an end to exploitation of sacadas. “This is war,” fumed a Negros sugar planter.

John Paul returned in 1995 to preside over World Youth Day where over four million flooded to Luneta to attend the closing Mass. That’s the current world record for the “largest papal gathering in Catholic history.”

On entering St. Peter’s Square in May 1981, John Paul II was shot four times by Mehmet Ali Agca who was sentenced to life. The Pope forgave Agca. At John Paul’s request, he was pardoned by Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and was deported to Turkey in June 2000.

The rule books say five years must pass after a person’s death before even a beatification process can begin. It took 341 years for Pedro Calungsod of the Visayas to be canonized and 28 years for St. Thérèse of Lisieux, France.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta was beatified in October 2003—less than two years after her death, John Paul II allowed the immediate opening of her canonization cause. Seen in this context, the April 27 rites for John XXIII and John Paul II are in the express lane.

This February, the Archdiocese of Cebu submitted to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in the Vatican the conclusion of a three-year study into the life of Archbishop Teofilo Camomot. The late prelate was known to hock even his pectoral cross to help the poor. Msgr. Dennis Villarojo has been named as postulator for the beatification process.

At the end of John Paul’s funeral Mass in 2005, throngs chanted, Santo Subito. What were they really saying in the demand for “Saint Now”? asked Chicago Tribune’s Kenneth Woodward. “They were crying out that in Karol Wojtyla, they saw someone who lived with God and lived with us.”
In over 27 years as 263rd successor to Peter the Fisherman, John Paul II traveled the world, bringing to men and women the gospel… beyond all geographical boundaries.

He crossed continents of the spirit, often far from one another and set against each other… to make room in the world for the peace of Christ. “Truly he has been Pontifex, a builder of bridges in a world that too often erects walls and divisions.”