Today is the feast of Pope Saint John Paul II. It is the first time his Feast Day as a canonized saint has been observed. He was declared a saint by Pope Francis earlier this year on April 27^th.

On April 2, 2005, I was in Rome. My room was directly across the street from John Paul’s room. That was the day the Pope died. Later I saw his body being carried into Saint Peter’s Basilica.

He had been Pope for 26 years, the second longest papacy in the history of the Church. I remember the day he was elected Pope in 1978. At the time, I was still in shock over the untimely and still controversial death of John Paul the First, who had been Pope for only 33 days.

Although I admired John Paul II and had been a priest when he was Pope, I disagreed with some of his decisions. Not about doctrine, but about the way the Church was governed.

When he was elected, I was a member of the City Council of Hailey and a nominated candidate for the Idaho State Legislature. I had to resign from both positions because the new pope no longer allowed priests to hold public office. I disagreed with that, but had no choice.

I also disagreed with his suppression of Liberation Theology in Latin America. That’s a topic for another day, since now Pope Francis supports Liberation Theology.

I also thought the Holy Father did not pay attention to problems within the Church. The scandal regarding the conduct of some priests and the institutional effort to silence and deny that, has cast a grave shadow over the Church.

To the outside world, Pope John Paul had rock star status. He was widely admired for his personality, his style and his many travels. He would eventually visit 129 countries. Young people, who had known no other pope, were especially fond of him.

It was acknowledged by both President Reagan and the last communist leader of the Soviet Union, that Pope John Paul was instrumental in the defeat of communism in Europe. That is why he was almost killed in Saint Peter’s Square.

He spoke eleven languages and was an acknowledged scholar. Inside the Church, he tried – unsuccessfully – to unite the progressive and the traditional wings of the Church. His great goal of uniting the Roman Catholic with the Orthodox churches never happened.

Due to the wounds he suffered in the assassination attempt and to advancing age, he suffered greatly and courageously in his final years. He was determined to live until the Great Jubilee of the year 2000. He did, but he wrote in his diary that he had planned to retire that year. He was persuaded not to, but the last years of his life were both a heroic witness to suffering and a paralysis within the Church where not much got done.

Some six years after John Paul died; I began to be very ill. I was in great pain for a long time and was near death. Despite my disappointments in some of his actions, I began to pray to John Paul. I do not hesitate to attribute my recovery to his intercession.

The morning of his death in 2005, I celebrated mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica. There are 44 altars in Saint Peter’s and I was assigned one near the main altar and to the right (north) side. Since I was in the Vatican where Latin is the official language, I celebrated mass in that language. My congregation consisted of two nuns from Portland. At the point where the priest mentions the name of the Pope and then of the Bishop, I realized that in Rome they are the same person. Until today, that was the last time in a mass when I have mentioned the name of Johannus Paulus Secundus.

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