Diarmuid Martin praises role of new saints

Saints are men and women who in their day to day ordinary lives try heroically to live the Christian life, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said today.

Dr Martin was speaking in the Pro Cathedral in Dublin this morning at a Mass to mark the canonisation of St John XXIII and St John Paul II.

“Saints are not men and women taken out of human history and human realities, but are witnesses as to how we should try to live. They are not perfect witnesses,” he said.

He recalled the election of both saints as Pope. “In 1958, when I was just 13 years old, my great fascination was with broadcasting. Ireland had at that time no television service. Telefís Éireann began in 1961….

“My family had, however, a large television aerial perched on our roof, capable of receiving far-from-perfect BBC television images from Belfast. In a storm it would have been capable of bringing down the entire chimney on which it was fixed!

“Much of my homework was done watching television and that’s what I was doing late one autumn evening in 1958 when BBC television interrupted its programming to bring the announcement of the new pope.

“When my parents returned home they asked me what my impressions were of the new Pope. I honestly had to say that I was slightly bewildered,” he said.

“After the severe and austere figure of Pope Pius XII, as we had known him through photographs and occasionally on filmed newsreels, this rather corpulent and jovial new Pope seemed to me anything but ‘Pope-like’.

“Pope John was in fact about to change what being ‘Pope-like’ meant. Pope John was to bring change to the Church and to change the impact of the Church on the world of his time.”

In 1978 he was in St Peter’s Square when the election of St John Paul II was announced. “Again, it was a surprise and very few could have imagined the extraordinary effect that this young Pope - he was only 58 years old at the time - was to have on the church and the world.

“He was the first Pope to journey to so many countries in all continents. At the same time it should be remembered that he rarely missed a Sunday visit to a Roman Parish. He was very much the Bishop of Rome. By 1978 times had changed.

“Instead of the unsteady black and white images of the election of Pope John, the world’s media was present in a massive way at the election of Pope John Paul II, as indeed they would be 27 years later on the occasion of his funeral.”

He was then “a very junior Vatican official. Within a short time I was beginning to have closer contact with that Pope who was to ordain me Bishop in 1999 and at whose wish I was to become Archbishop of Dublin ten years ago, yesterday (April 26th).”

Dr Martin also gave “thanks to God for the gifts which these two Popes brought to the Church and for their incessant dedication and prayer for the Church at times of rapid change in the Church and the world”.