Venerable Pope John Paul II to be Beatified

[sees_all1]

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/cardinals-approve-miracle-for-jpii-beatification/

The first miracle has been attributed to JPII, who should be beatified sometime this year.

 

 

To be canonized a saint in the Catholic Church, usually there is a 5 year wait period before a bishop will investigate a person's life, and send the information to the Vatican. This was fast-tracked for JPII by Pope Benedict XVI. After evidence is presented, the Pope can then decide to proclaim the person as Venerable, which means they've lead a holy life.

 

After that, a miracle must be attributed to the person posthumously. Usually these are medical miracles - someone with an incurable disease prays to the person, and they suddenly find themselves cured. In this case, it was a French Nun who was cured of Parkinson's Disease.

The Vatican will then investigate the miracle claim, talk to experts and verify it to be legitimate or not. In this case, the Vatican verified the Nun was in fact cured of Parkinson's, and she did pray to JPII.

A person with one miracle attributed to them will be beatified.

 

 

The final step is another miracle must be attributed, following the same process as the second step. After that the Church canonizes them as a Saint.

 

http://people.howstuffworks.com/question6191.htm

 

 

 

You don't have to be Catholic to appreciate that this process requires supernatural events to occur. I'm surprised to see a verified miracle so soon, usually it takes a hundred years.

Discuss.

[Alg]

Interesting, though wish I knew more about the process itself. Do not know much about the church's structure :oops:

[Bloodstain]

The Vatican will then investigate the miracle claim, talk to experts and verify it to be legitimate or not. In this case, the Vatican verified the Nun was in fact cured of Parkinson's, and she did pray to JPII.

 

Lol. This is too funny. Nice to know it's so easy to get something verified as a legit miracle

[Ginger_Warrior]

I don't know whether they meant Parkinson's disease or parkinsonism. Curing the first would truly be a miracle though, given no cure exists and the only current prognosis is one of managing the development of the disease.

[Will H]

Sigh. I believe in God, and I think that the Christians teach a lot of good ideas on morals. But this is what's killing reasonable religion, it's still adhering to stupid ideas like someone being cured of terminal illnesses because of prayer. Our world doesn't give us helping hands and concessions along the way if we do certain things and pray to the right people while we're alive. Good people generally live as long as bad people.

 

The world is magnificent already, so why do we humans need to apply our own exemptions to universal facts?

[sees_all1]

The Vatican will then investigate the miracle claim, talk to experts and verify it to be legitimate or not. In this case, the Vatican verified the Nun was in fact cured of Parkinson's, and she did pray to JPII.

 

Lol. This is too funny. Nice to know it's so easy to get something verified as a legit miracle

The current miracle was that a nun was cured of Parkinson's disease. There is no medical cure for this, so whatever happened wasn't by human intervention. One day she had Parkinson's, had shaking hands, and slurred speech, and the next she didn't. Something happened in between, and whether it is God or Space Aliens, I don't know, but it certainly was extraordinary.

[Bloodstain]

The Vatican will then investigate the miracle claim, talk to experts and verify it to be legitimate or not. In this case, the Vatican verified the Nun was in fact cured of Parkinson's, and she did pray to JPII.

 

Lol. This is too funny. Nice to know it's so easy to get something verified as a legit miracle

The current miracle was that a nun was cured of Parkinson's disease. There is no medical cure for this, so whatever happened wasn't by human intervention. One day she had Parkinson's, had shaking hands, and slurred speech, and the next she didn't. Something happened in between, and whether it is God or Space Aliens, I don't know, but it certainly was extraordinary.

 

Or maybe, just maybe, this nun who had Parkinsons (needs to be diagnosed by a doctor) ISN'T cured, or something logical and explainable happened that changed her Parkinsons. But since they aren't looking for anything but evidence that it was a miracle, I guess they're only going to come to the conclusion that it was a miracle.

[sees_all1]

Or maybe, just maybe, this nun who had Parkinsons (needs to be diagnosed by a doctor) ISN'T cured, or something logical and explainable happened that changed her Parkinsons. But since they aren't looking for anything but evidence that it was a miracle, I guess they're only going to come to the conclusion that it was a miracle.

I don't believe she's been misdiagnosed, but she may still have Parkinson's. If she does, it isn't a miracle :wink: .

 

Canonized Saints aren't as common as you think. Of the estimated billion and a half Catholics that ever were, only about 3,000 of them have ever been canonized (about 500 of them since 1984?, when the new process was put into place by Pope John Paul II which removed the "Devil's Advocate").

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2011/01/14/f-religion-catholic-saint.html

[Bloodstain]

This "miracle" sure isn't documented well and is missing a lot of important details.

[sees_all1]

This "miracle" sure isn't documented well and is missing a lot of important details.

Or maybe you haven't bothered to look:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1547146/Miracle-nun-talks-of-her-Parkinsons-cure.html

 

"When I went to see my neurologist, he looked at me and said: what happened, have you been taking double doses of your dopamine medication? No, doctor, I replied, Ive stopped taking it completely," said sister Marie-Simon-Pierre, a member of the "Little Sisters of Catholic Maternities."

 

"He concluded that there was no more sign of the illness. He was a bit stunned by what he saw. Like me, he remained silent in the face of the inexplicable. Words failed him," said the nun, wearing the black and white habit and silver cross of her congregation.

[Bloodstain]

Emotion overcame her briefly when she explained how her symptoms had deteriorated after the pontiffs death in April 2005. But just two months later, she was suddenly cured.

 

In her room after evening prayers, an inner voice urged her to "take up your pen and write." She obeyed, and was amazed to see that her handwriting, until then illegible due to her illness, had become clear. "The pen skipped across the page," she said. The nun then went to bed, slept better than she had done in years, and woke early the next morning feeling "completely transformed."

 

Lol

[das1330]

The Vatican will then investigate the miracle claim, talk to experts and verify it to be legitimate or not. In this case, the Vatican verified the Nun was in fact cured of Parkinson's, and she did pray to JPII.

 

Lol. This is too funny. Nice to know it's so easy to get something verified as a legit miracle

 

The catholic church is actually known to be quite careful about attributing miracles only when no practical explanation exists. While real, non-prayer related reasons might exist for the improvement, they usually search quite hard to find them.

[Bloodstain]

The Vatican will then investigate the miracle claim, talk to experts and verify it to be legitimate or not. In this case, the Vatican verified the Nun was in fact cured of Parkinson's, and she did pray to JPII.

 

Lol. This is too funny. Nice to know it's so easy to get something verified as a legit miracle

 

The catholic church is actually known to be quite careful about attributing miracles only when no practical explanation exists. While real, non-prayer related reasons might exist for the improvement, they usually search quite hard to find them.

 

 

Oops.

It was the miracle that set Pope John Paul II on the road to sainthood and provided faithful followers with proof of his holy powers. But hopes that the former pope's canonisation would be fast-tracked by Sister Marie Simon-Pierre's recovery from Parkinson's disease have been set back by reports that the French nun has fallen ill again.

Simon-Pierre described three years ago how she regained her health after a night of prayer to the then recently deceased Polish pontiff. John Paul also suffered from Parkinson's disease, which is incurable.

 

"It's like a second birth," she said at the time. "I feel like I've discovered a new body, new limbs."

 

In 2007 Simon-Pierre could barely move her left side, could not write legibly, drive or move around easily and was in constant pain.

 

Her disease worsened after the pope's death, and her order prayed for his intervention to ease her suffering. Then after writing his name on a paper one night, she woke up the next day apparently cured and returned to work as a maternity nurse with no traces of the disease.

But according to the Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita, one of the doctors charged with scrutinising the nun's case believed she might have been suffering from a similar nervous disease, not Parkinson's, which could go into sudden remission. A report on the paper's website went further, saying that the 49-year-old nun had become sick again with the same illness.

 

The Vatican was making no comment on the grounds that the late pope's case was still under examination.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/05/nun-cured-pope-parkinsons-ill

 

They're getting their info from a Polish daily newspaper I know nothing about, but it should be confirmed or denied soon if she is sick again

[stevepole]

Thats' very interesting, I didn't know we did that as a church or at least it's process.

[fakeitormakeit2]

As someone theologically learned, I find the process of canonization, and the entire concept of a "saint", particularly misleading to the average Catholic. I do believe in the Communion of Saints and think the idea of deeming persons' lives worthy of imitation but it is also a bit dangerous faith-wise. It causes several confusions in terms of:

 

(1) all those who have died and ascended to heaven are saints, regardless of official acknowledgment or veneration, but many put canonized saints on an entire different level from all other departed who could possibly be in heaven

(2) the Church's declaration of sainthood has no bearing on the actuality of a person being a saint. Some tend to think that the Church assigns sainthood. The Church merely takes an educated guess through a system that has a couple mechanisms that act as filters.

(3) the worst misconception of all is the notion of praying to a saint. The only being that should be prayed to is God. To pray to a saint to perform something as one would pray to God is simply polytheism in a different wrapping. Many people pray to saints in an almost cult-like manner to help them, assigning specific tasks associated with them, such as St. Anthony is patron of finding lost items, St. Michael as defender of police men and soldiers, etc.. This is an extremely icy path, as that's just as bad as having pantheon of gods with each one having a particular area they rule. One may pray with a saint in request so that that particular saint may use their merits to intercede on behalf of a cause, but the saint themselves have no ability to do anything. Such is like attributing holy powers to JPII, absolutely not, only God has "holy powers". This is becoming of increasing importance due to the rise of neoclassical [specifically Process] theology and the hypothesizing of God's power being exclusively persuasive in regards to interacting with different levels of complexity-consciousness, but that's an entirely different discussion in itself.

 

That being said, I look forward to JPII's eventual canonization, as he truly deserves it. I just hope that Catholic priests, particularly bishops, do something to amend these vast misconceptions that may seem small but they make a huge difference in terms of consistency of the faith.

[fakeitormakeit2]

^ In the latest forms of Catholic theology, there isn't really such a notion as a direct "divine intervention", or at least divine intervention in a "coercive" manner (i.e. God tells cancer to go away) would not be consistent with them.

[obfuscator]

As someone theologically learned, I find the process of canonization, and the entire concept of a "saint", particularly misleading to the average Catholic. I do believe in the Communion of Saints and think the idea of deeming persons' lives worthy of imitation but it is also a bit dangerous faith-wise. It causes several confusions in terms of:

 

(1) all those who have died and ascended to heaven are saints, regardless of official acknowledgment or veneration, but many put canonized saints on an entire different level from all other departed who could possibly be in heaven

True - but canonized saints aren't being put on a different level - they're merely being clarified as having made it to heaven by something that is beyond worldy explanation (at least with our knowledge to this point).

(2) the Church's declaration of sainthood has no bearing on the actuality of a person being a saint. Some tend to think that the Church assigns sainthood. The Church merely takes an educated guess through a system that has a couple mechanisms that act as filters.

Not much to say here, agreed.

(3) the worst misconception of all is the notion of praying to a saint. The only being that should be prayed to is God. To pray to a saint to perform something as one would pray to God is simply polytheism in a different wrapping. Many people pray to saints in an almost cult-like manner to help them, assigning specific tasks associated with them, such as St. Anthony is patron of finding lost items, St. Michael as defender of police men and soldiers, etc.. This is an extremely icy path, as that's just as bad as having pantheon of gods with each one having a particular area they rule. One may pray with a saint in request so that that particular saint may use their merits to intercede on behalf of a cause, but the saint themselves have no ability to do anything. Such is like attributing holy powers to JPII, absolutely not, only God has "holy powers". This is becoming of increasing importance due to the rise of neoclassical [specifically Process] theology and the hypothesizing of God's power being exclusively persuasive in regards to interacting with different levels of complexity-consciousness, but that's an entirely different discussion in itself.

 

That being said, I look forward to JPII's eventual canonization, as he truly deserves it. I just hope that Catholic priests, particularly bishops, do something to amend these vast misconceptions that may seem small but they make a huge difference in terms of consistency of the faith.

 

Agreed once again - you pray for intercesion, not to the saint themself. A complex subject, for sure...

Also agreed that I'm looking forward to his canonization - the man was at very least a selfless and inspiring model for many people, both religious and otherwise.

 

Nice to see an actual insightful post on the topic, other than the usual "god's not real lolol" garbage.

 

@ring_world: the process for identifying a "miracle" as legitimate, or without reasonable explanation, is actually quite stringent. Did you know, in fact, that despite JPII abolishing the role of devils's advocate, when they were in the process of the cause for beatification of mother teresa, they requested that christopher hitchens (i assume you know who he his) come in and specifically make a case against the miracles that had so far been attributed to her. Doesn't exactly sound like an organization wishing to force sainthood without adequate consideration.

[Alg]

Also agreed that I'm looking forward to his canonization - the man was at very least a selfless and inspiring model for many people, both religious and otherwise.

Ideally, this would be why canonization exists. A way to say "Hey, this is the kind of guy we should try to be like". Don't really need miracles for that.

[sees_all1]

(3) the worst misconception of all is the notion of praying to a saint. The only being that should be prayed to is God. To pray to a saint to perform something as one would pray to God is simply polytheism in a different wrapping. Many people pray to saints in an almost cult-like manner to help them, assigning specific tasks associated with them, such as St. Anthony is patron of finding lost items, St. Michael as defender of police men and soldiers, etc.. This is an extremely icy path, as that's just as bad as having pantheon of gods with each one having a particular area they rule. One may pray with a saint in request so that that particular saint may use their merits to intercede on behalf of a cause, but the saint themselves have no ability to do anything. Such is like attributing holy powers to JPII, absolutely not, only God has "holy powers". This is becoming of increasing importance due to the rise of neoclassical [specifically Process] theology and the hypothesizing of God's power being exclusively persuasive in regards to interacting with different levels of complexity-consciousness, but that's an entirely different discussion in itself.

 

That being said, I look forward to JPII's eventual canonization, as he truly deserves it. I just hope that Catholic priests, particularly bishops, do something to amend these vast misconceptions that may seem small but they make a huge difference in terms of consistency of the faith.

 

Agreed once again - you pray for intercesion, not to the saint themself. A complex subject, for sure...

Also agreed that I'm looking forward to his canonization - the man was at very least a selfless and inspiring model for many people, both religious and otherwise.

Praying with whoever "for intersession on your behalf" is a much more complicated phrase than the word "to," but yes, that is the correct terminology and the correct idea.

Getting that far into the subject is pretty darned deep though, something that I'd expect a priest or theologian to know and explain but not the Average Joe.

[fakeitormakeit2]

Also agreed that I'm looking forward to his canonization - the man was at very least a selfless and inspiring model for many people, both religious and otherwise.

Ideally, this would be why canonization exists. A way to say "Hey, this is the kind of guy we should try to be like". Don't really need miracles for that.

The requirement of miracles purportedly acts as a divine confirmation of the ability to a departed person to intercede because they have achieved heaven. The Eastern Churches (i.e. Eastern Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox) determine sainthood by gauging popular consensus. I'm not really a fan of the requirement of miracles, but I'm not the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. I am a big fan of Pope Benedict XVI, however, as he's extremely intelligent and holds certain theological opinions that run against the grain.

 

& @sees_all1 that's the problem, the general number of Catholics omit themselves from a proper understanding, so you have that group of old ladies in church who are like cultists haha. But seriously, it's a big issue, especially in terms of Marian devotion.

[Giordano]

Sounds like a popularity contest.

[obfuscator]

Also agreed that I'm looking forward to his canonization - the man was at very least a selfless and inspiring model for many people, both religious and otherwise.

Ideally, this would be why canonization exists. A way to say "Hey, this is the kind of guy we should try to be like". Don't really need miracles for that.

The requirement of miracles purportedly acts as a divine confirmation of the ability to a departed person to intercede because they have achieved heaven. The Eastern Churches (i.e. Eastern Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox) determine sainthood by gauging popular consensus. I'm not really a fan of the requirement of miracles, but I'm not the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. I am a big fan of Pope Benedict XVI, however, as he's extremely intelligent and holds certain theological opinions that run against the grain.

 

& @sees_all1 that's the problem, the general number of Catholics omit themselves from a proper understanding, so you have that group of old ladies in church who are like cultists haha. But seriously, it's a big issue, especially in terms of Marian devotion.

Yes marian devotion can certainly become almost god-like at times. I actually do like the miracle requirement - as it is basically the best way to determine if there is at least something possibily supernatural that can be interpreted as some sort of sign, other than just a blind guess.

 

@sees_all: a good analogy is one of an "in with the boss". If you're looking for a job, you could ask the boss directly - but if you ask someone who works at the place already to put in a good word for you you're that much more likely to be successful.