..the feast of Blessed John Paul. Once a person is declared Blessed by the Church, the feast-day can be celebrated - but only in the place(s) with which he or she has been associated, unless or until Bishops elsewhere make a special request. Thus today is a feast-day in Rome and in Poland. But the Bishops of the USA voted to ask the Church to have the feast celebrated in America and so today, it will be!
I think it would be great if it could be celebrated in England and Wales, too, so I am going to write to my Archbishop to suggest this. Why not join me, by writing a note to your Bishop, too?
There are a lot of plans for honouring Bl John Paul the Great, which will develop over the next years, and celebrating his feast-day will be an annual joy...let's get it well established in the calendar...
4 comments:
Why do call him John Paul the Great?
A great many reasons, some of which are enumerated here:http://www.faith.org.uk/publications/Magazines/May12/May12WasJohnPaulGreat.html
But a brief comment is also in order: for Blessed John Paul, the Papacy was for mission, for conversion, for evangelising, for bringing the Gospel of Christ to the world. He was the first Pope since St Peter to visit a synagogue, the first Pope in centuries to bring together people of different faiths in recognition of their need to pray to God for peace. He was twice attacked by would-be assasins, and was subjected to insults and verbal assaults throughout his pontificate especially as he spoke out clearly on the great moral issues facing the human race including abortion and sexual immorality: undeterred, he continued to teach with love and with patience. He inspired millions of people to rediscover the spiritual truths which ensured the collapse of Communism. He spoke for the poor, the lonely, the forgotten, the gravely sick, the threatened, the wounded - and showed the world that this was what the Church had always sought to do and would go on doing. His own life had been marked by sorrow since he lost his mother as a small boy and went on to lose a beloved brother, a beloved father, and a beloved country and its freedom, before he was twenty - but his faith in God deepened and he radiated hope and joy as a priest and as a bishop. He was gifted with a brilliant mind, as philosopher, poet, playwright and priest, was fluent in some dozen or more languages and steeped in a knowledge of history and literature, but he spoke to simple people with ease and companionship. He had a deep prayer-life and seems to have been something of a mystic, but was also a sportsman, skier, and mountaineer with a love of the outdoors that matched his love of people old and young. He had a gift for friendship. He suffered from ill-health and endured a number of serious operations with courage and in old age and with a debilitating disease he continued his pastoral work. His priority was to serve God at every moment, and he spent hours of each day in prayer while never neglecting his work, his study,and his innumerable acts of personal generosity and kindness. This is only a short list of the more obvious reasons for his greatness. Historians will add more as the years go by.
Joanna's an historian. Unlike saint or venerable or blessed, or doctor of the Church, there's no official title of "the Great" bestowed by the Church. It's by the coomon consent of historians.
I would have thought that, logically, it ought to be celebrated in every country he actually visited. Once he's canonised, of course, it will be celebrated everywhere.
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