Pope Benedict XVI Beatifies His Predecessor John Paul II, Whose Family’s Roots Are Said to Be Romanian

Beatus Johannes Paulus Secundus (sacbee.com)

Pope Benedict XVI presided on Sunday over the beatification Mass of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, before a million faithful gathered in San Pietro Square and the surroundings.

In the homily, Benedict XVI said that the new beatus of the Roman Catholic Church distinguished himself by the courage to stand up to, and turn the Marxist tide of atheism, and by the fact that he was able to restore the confidence of the Christian people, and give them the strength to bear with the head held high the name of Christian.

Held in a sea of Polish white-and-red flags, the beatification of the Polish-born pope (whose ancestors are said to have come to Poland from neighboring Romania, as we shall see bellow), the fastest in modern times, brings him one step closer to being beatified, and is a moral boost for a Church that is facing fierce accusations of sexual abuses by its priests.

At the beginning at the Mass, Benedict proclaimed him “Blessed,” and the crowd cheered and applauded this proclamation.

Then the pope received a silver reliquary with a vial of blood taken during the last hospitalization of the former pope. This relic, which is vital for the beatification service, will be exhibited so that the faithful may venerate it.

Pope Benedict XVI Kissing the Reliquary

The vial of blood was presented to the pope by the Polish nun who tended to John Paul II throughout his pontificate and by Sister Marie-Simone-Pierre, the French nun whose inexplicable recovery from Parkinson (the nun is said to have earnestly prayed to John Paul II, who also suffered from the same illness) was construed as the necessary miracle for proclaiming him as beatus.

The ceremony was attended by personalities such as Crown Prince of Spain Felipe and Princess Letizia, Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, former Polish President Lech Walesa, or even Robert Gabriel Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe.

According to police, 16 heads of state, seven prime ministers and five members of the royal houses of Europe were estimated to participate in this ceremony.

The sanctification was not well received by all the people, virulent criticism being drawn from the families of those sexually abused by Catholic priests, who said that, considering the way the former pope dealt with the abuse cases, his beatification was “rubbing more salt” in their wounds.

There was even criticism about the rapidity of proclamation, considering that it has only been a few years since he passed away.

The beatitude of John Paul II will only be observed and revered within the Roman Catholic world, since the Protestant Churches do not believe in visible signs of sainthood, and consequently do not revere saints, while the Eastern Orthodox Churches have different criteria and methods of proclaiming saints and between the two branches of Christianity there hasn’t been any share of reverence for the saints proclaimed by each one since 1054, when they officially separated.

However, on Saturday, before the beatification ceremony, historical information surfaced in the media of Romania, a country with an estimate of about 80% of population Eastern Orthodox, as to the origins of pope John Paul II’s family.

According to researchers like Nicolae Mares, who wrote a book called Pope John Paul II and Romania, and was the official translator of pope’s books into Romanian, during a private audience with him in February 1993, the pope asked: “What news of our Romania?”

Pope John Paul II and Romanian Patriarch Teoctist

Mares quotes Polish historians who say that the village where Bartolomei Wojtyla, pope’s grand-grandfather, was born in 1788 had been established by Romanian herders who had taken their flocks from the northern Romanian territories to south Poland. (There is a theory in Romanian historiography that the people in southern Poland called “Gorals” are of Romanian origin, being slavonized during the Middle Ages.)

He adds that the name of the pope’s family Wojtyla, is often encountered in the medieval Romanian documents as “Voitilă.”

One extraargument in favor of Romanian descent of pope’s family presented by Romanian researchers is the fact that on one occasion he recited in Romanian the poem „Rugaciune” (Prayer), written by Romanian national poet Mihai Eminescu, which is one of the most respected poems in Romanian literature.

The papal visit to Bucharest in 1999 was also the first visit to an Eastern Orthodox land of a pope since 1054. Upon his arrival, he kissed the land of the country, praised the martyrs of the Orthodox Church killed by the Communist regime, said he had long wanted to visit Romania, a country “much dear” to him, and called it “The Garden of The Holy Mother of God.”

In 1986, he recognized that the Romanian Orthodox Church was of apostolic origin, that it was dating since the days of the apostles, thus sanctioning the claim of the Romanians that their Church was founded by Apostle Andrew in the first decades of Christianity.

During pope’s visit to Bucharest, the people shouted: “Unity! Unity!” a desire which John Paul took to the heart and remembered during a Mass in Vatican, when he uttered the words in Romanian: “Unitate! Unitate!” causing the entire Saint Peter’s Square to shout in Romanian the same words.

However strong the wish for unity may be among the lay people (many of those in Romania being little aware of the subtleties of the doctrines of their own Church, as a result of 50 years of atheist state propaganda), the role papacy assumed in the Middle Ages, as vicarius Filii Dei, and at the end of the First Council of Vatican in 1869-1870, as infallible while proclaiming doctrines, is likely to impede the Orthodox Churches, including the one in Romania, to acknowledge the Roman Catholic Church as una inter pares any time soon (much less as prima inter pares), considering that for many Orthodox clergy, and even lay people, these claims are construed as a form of adoring a man in stead of God (the Protestants of the Reformation went much further considering the popes in their days as Antichrist), not to mention that they are accompanied by other doctrines (most of which were also heavily and brutally criticized by the Western Reformation in the 16th-17th centuries), such as the procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son, the fact that the Virgin did not share the original sin, the  purgatory, the withholding of the chalice from the lay, the celibacy of clergy, the celebration of Eucharist with unleavened bread, even the way to proclaim saints, which the Orthodox Churches do not share, on the grounds that they were not handed down by the Apostles and the Church Fathers, and were not sanctioned by the seven Ecumenical Councils of the early Church, which leaves the unity that is so much coveted to be probably expressed in the field of practical work of charity and social assistance of the destitute, but highly unlikely with regard to eucharistic communion or dogmatic consensus.

Romanians and Poles have shared a great deal of history, with ups and downs, and their intertwining oftenly produced commandable results, such as the renowned Orthodox Metropolitan of Kiev (by then a city in Poland) Peter Moghila, in the 17th century, the man to whom the entire Slavonic Orthodoxy owes a great deal, and who also had Romanian descent.