THOSE OF us old enough to recall that September 1979 day when John Paul II celebrated an open-air Mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park would have recognised the occasion. This then was another of those JPII days when the fold-up chair was your only man.
At Cesano train station, 40km outside the Eternal City, French, Polish and Italian pilgrims were up and gathered by 5.30am. Armed with rucksacks and chairs, they re-enacted a ritual that from Benin to Bangladesh and from Warsaw to Washington had so strongly marked the John Paul pontificate. Namely, the “Get-There-In-Time” rush for the JPII papal gig.
All roads around here literally and metaphorically led to Rome yesterday. If somehow you had managed not to notice the impending event, even your Rome “BIT” train ticket would have informed you since it bore a picture of a seemingly suffering John Paul II.
In St Peter’s Square, too, where Pope Benedict XVI presided over the beatification ceremony, there was a sense not so much of deja vu as of the last hurrah for the million or so JPII “Papa Boys”.
While the beatification of John Paul II is most certainly not without controversy, it was hard yesterday not to be overwhelmed one more time by the immensity of his pontificate. A series of 27 posters hanging in the Bernini colonnade, each one representing a year in that pontificate from his election in 1978 to his death in 2005 and including a who’s who of world leaders met along the way, served as a striking reminder of the impact of the Polish pope.
As a huge tapestry image of JPII flew in the breeze from the front balcony of the Basilica of St Peter’s, Pope Benedict yesterday touched on the same theme, saying: “For 23 years . . . 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 . . . Then, too, there was his witness in suffering: the Lord gradually stripped him of everything, yet he remained a ‘rock’, as Christ desired”.