A Popes Beatification Stirs Excitement and Dissension
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: April 28, 2011
VATICAN CITY On a sunny afternoon this week, St. Peters Square was abuzz with life. Crowds lined up at the metal detectors. Tourists snapped photos. A workman was spraying down the travertine steps to the basilica. And inside, red cloth screens cordoned off a side chapel that will soon draw as many visitors as Michelangelos Pietà nearby.
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The beatification is widely seen as a way not just to honor John Paul but to energize the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, like John Pauls 26-year papacy itself, it has become intensely polarizing.
For one thing, Benedict waived the traditional five-year wait and began the process weeks after John Pauls death, and critics across the Catholic spectrum have questioned the alacrity. Others say that the sex abuse crisis that emerged under John Paul is grounds against sainthood. On Saturday, at least one victims group plans a worldwide protest.
Defenders, however, say beatification is simply the formal seal of approval for a wildly popular pope who helped bring down Communism and whom many Catholics, especially in his native Poland, already consider a saint. Hundreds of thousands are expected in Rome, the biggest crowds since 2005, when cries of Santo subito! or Sainthood now, erupted at his funeral Mass.
This beatification is different because this pope is different. Hes a man with a role in history, not just in church history, said Andrea Riccardi, the founder of the Community of SantEgidio, a liberal Catholic group and a biographer of John Paul who testified in his favor in the beatification process. The seal of sainthood doesnt close the debate on history, he added. In a certain sense, for many Catholics hes already a saint, even without beatification and, lets be honest, even without a miracle.
Saint-making is intensely political. The impulse must arise from the faithful, but ultimately most saints causes are championed by religious groups with the organizational skills, and fund-raising, to keep their causes alive. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and head of the Vaticans doctrinal watchdog, Pope Benedict in 1989 criticized this tendency, saying there had been too many beatifications of marginal figures.
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To Vatican watchers, John Pauls beatification is a snapshot of the Catholic Church in 2011 mingling deep faith and dense bureaucracy, grass-roots devotion and top-down power politics, the medieval and the contemporary.
In many ways, the beatification underscores how Benedict, a bookish yet never predictable pope whose papacy has been racked by crises and is intellectually focused on Europe, still derives much of his light and heat from his telegenic, globe-trotting predecessor.
But it also shows how dark clouds still hang over John Pauls papacy, not least the sex abuse crisis and his close ties to the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the Mexican founder of the wealthy and powerful religious order Legionaries of Christ. Father Maciel, a charismatic leader hailed by John Paul as a model of dynamic priesthood, was later found to have fathered several children and abused seminarians. Last year, Benedict took the step of placing the entire order under Vatican receivership.
But during John Pauls papacy, Vatican officials blocked an investigation of Father Maciel, and the pope publicly honored him in 2004 even after seminarians had come forward with allegations of abuse. Father Maciel was particularly close to John Pauls longtime personal secretary, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, now the archbishop of Krakow, who has championed the beatification.
Critics say that in beatifying John Paul, the Vatican is trying to close the history books before they have been fully opened.
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