[caption id="attachment_4002" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Pope John Paul II"]
[/caption]With this Pope Benedict XVI memorialized Pope John Paul II in the ceremony that brings the deceased and Pope so beloved in his lifetime a step closer to sainthood. Pope Benedict presided over a ceremony that brought some 1.5 million pilgrims to Rome Sunday for a mass that filled St. Peter's square, according to a press release earlier today.
In his statements before the crowd, Pope Benedict spoke of John Paul's work in turning back communism and for having "the strength of a titan, a strength which came to him from God."
John Paul, of Poland, was unique in his position, being the first non-Italian to occupy the office.
Catholic war veterans have this description about him on their website:
"All lives run along a set of rails: family background, native abilities, education, interests and habits. Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, was a man whose life ran along a particularly broad-gauged rail bed. He was the most visible human being in history, having been seen live by more people than any man who ever lived; yet he had a deeply ingrained sense of privacy and an old-fashioned, even courtly, sense of manners. He inspired tens of millions of people by the intensity of his faith; yet he was a mystic who found it impossible to describe some of his own most profound religious experiences. He was arguably the most well-informed man of his time; yet he rarely read newspapers.
He had a profound impact on the late 20th century; yet he was completely convinced that culture, not politics or economics, was the engine that drove history. He had a deep appreciation of untutored popular piety; yet he was a world-class intellectual insatiably curious about the latest trends in philosophy and literature. Whether he was meeting Mikhail Gorbachev or the Union of Italian Hairdressers, the children of friends or the princes of his own church, every encounter took place within the horizon of John Paul II's absolutely unshakable conviction that the men and women he met were players in a great cosmic drama that had God as its author and director."
