John Paul remembered a year after his death

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of people from
around the world flocked to the Vatican on Sunday to mark the
first anniversary of the death of Pope John Paul and pray that
he be made a saint soon.

They came from the late Pope’s native Poland, from the
United States, Asia and Italy to take part in a string of
commemorations that will include a moment of silence at 9:37
p.m. (1937 GMT), the moment that he died a year ago.

Speaking at his noon address before he was due to start the
commemorations, Pope Benedict recalled how his predecessor had
“left a deep mark on the history of the Church and of
humanity.”

“John Paul died as he lived, moved by an indomitable
courage of faith,” Benedict told pilgrims gathered in a sunny
St Peter’s Square.

Benedict, who will say a memorial mass on Monday afternoon,
recalled how much the Pope suffered without complaint and that
John Paul died in the same apartment from where he was
speaking.

“In the last years of his life, the Lord gradually stripped
(the Pope) of everything in order to fully assimilate him (with
God),” Benedict said, his words interrupted several times by
applause and chants of “John Paul, John Paul.”

“When he could no longer travel, then no longer walk and in
the end no longer speak, his gesture … was reduced to the
essential: a gift of himself to the last instant,” he said.

As the Pope spoke from his window overlooking the square,
more and more pilgrims, some waving national flags, began
arriving to commemorate John Paul and pray at his tomb.

WOUND STILL OPEN

“I don’t have the words to express my feelings. He was not
only our father but a father to the whole world,” said Hanna
Ulatowska, a 29-year-old flower shop owner who came from
Warsaw.

Many in the crowd said they would be praying that the late
Pope could be made a saint soon. Crowds at his funeral last
year chanted “Santo Subito” (“Make him a saint now”).

The feeling was the same at the Lagiewniki shrine near
Krakow, where thousands of Poles, including Polish President
Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz,
attended a memorial mass said by the late Pope’s private
secretary, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz.

“I pray every day so that John Paul II is made saint. He is
a man that changed Poland, changed me, changed the whole world.
He was already a saint in his lifetime,” said Katarzyna Malec,
a pensioner from Krakow.

Last May, Pope Benedict put his predecessor on the fast
track to sainthood by dispensing with Church rules that
normally impose a five-year waiting period after a candidate’s
death before the procedure that leads to sainthood can even
start.

Church officials are investigating the healing of a French
nun whose symptoms of Parkinson’s disease disappeared after she
prayed to the Pope. This may be the miracle the Church would
need to beatify the Pope, the last step before sainthood.

(Additonal reporting by Wojciech Zurawski in Lagiewniki)