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A Pope’s Beatification Stirs Excitement and Dissension

By RACHEL DONADIO

Published: April 28, 2011

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VATICAN CITY — On a sunny afternoon this week, St. Peter’s 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 Michelangelo’s Pietà nearby.

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Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters

This week, a poster was put up in St. Peter's Square of Pope John Paul II, who is to be beatified on Sunday.

Starting Sunday, that chapel is where the entombed remains of Pope John Paul II will be on view for public veneration — after Pope Benedict XVI presides over the biggest spectacle since his own installation in 2005: a beatification Mass that will move his adored predecessor a step closer to sainthood.

The beatification is widely seen as a way not just to honor John Paul but to energize the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, like John Paul’s 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 Paul’s 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. He’s a man with a role in history, not just in church history,” said Andrea Riccardi, the founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio, a liberal Catholic group and a biographer of John Paul who testified in his favor in the beatification process. “The seal of sainthood doesn’t close the debate on history,” he added. “In a certain sense, for many Catholics he’s already a saint, even without beatification and, let’s 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 Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, Pope Benedict in 1989 criticized this tendency, saying there had been too many beatifications of marginal figures.

But John Paul was an avid saint-maker who loosened the rules to make the process easier. He beatified more than 1,300 people and canonized 482 saints. Since 2005, Benedict has beatified 790 people and canonized 34 saints.

For John Paul to be beatified, a Vatican committee had to rule that he had performed a miracle. (To advance to sainthood, he needs an additional miracle.) In the proceedings, doctors and experts testified that a French nun had been miraculously cured from Parkinson’s disease after praying to John Paul. Their testimony was then notarized, and the committee certified the miracle.

To Vatican watchers, John Paul’s 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.

Those who cannot make the journey to Rome can follow the beatification on Twitter, become fans of John Paul on Facebook or watch the proceedings on the Vatican’s own YouTube channel. (This is, after all, the institution that quickly embraced the printing press and mass communications and whose own office of evangelization gave rise to the term propaganda.) A vial of John Paul’s blood, saved by a Rome hospital in case he needed a transfusion, will now be used as a holy relic.

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 Paul’s 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 Paul’s 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 Paul’s 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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A version of this article appeared in print on April 29, 2011, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: A Pope’s Beatification Stirs Excitement and Dissension.

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