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| NOLA.com |
Today
is Divine Mercy Sunday – a designation of the first Sunday after
Easter by Polish-born Pope John Paul II in 2000 promoting the Divine
Mercy devotions popularized by the early 20th-c. Polish seer and Saint Faustina
Kowalski based on her mystical encounters with Our Lord. A bare five years later the Pope would die on the very eve of that new Feast. It is
appropriate that this Feast has today, nine years further on, seen the solemn canonization of
the late Holy Father as Saint John Paul the Great, Pope and
Confessor. (I'm presuming that last is how he will be styled.)
Which
means that I can say, “I have seen a saint” – with my own eyes.
Granted, I have probably seen a great many saints in the more
general sense, those who are commemorated on the Feast of All Saints,
1 November each year, but never other than once in my life have I
been even remotely in the presence of one who would eventually be
formally recognized as such by the Church.
And
“remotely” it was indeed, almost three decades ago, on Saturday
12 September 1987, when I stood amidst a crowd of about 130,000
around a huge outdoor pavilion altar erected near the University of
New Orleans' Lakefront Arena, in sweltering heat and humidity and a
beating sun punctuated by rain as the Pope offered Mass. Here is the
rather sketchy account from the journal I was keeping quite
intermittently at the time:
