Pope urges Venice to build culture ingrained in the Gospel

After traveling through Venice's waterways in a gondola, Pope Benedict urged citizens gathered in the city's main square to farm a society fixed in the “firm foundations of the Gospel.”

“Venice is called to assume important responsibilities in promoting a culture of welcome and sharing,” the Pope said, opinion them to build “a culture of harmony and love that has its firm foundations in the Gospel.”

Pope Benedict's May 7 address in St. Mark's Square came during his two-day visit to Venice over the weekend. It was his first papal trip to the historic Italian city famously built upon a series of canals. The pontiff traveled on the same gondola used by Pope John Paul II in 1985 during the last papal visit to the city.

The Pope highlighted the “openness that has always characterized Venice” throughout his remarks to citizens and government officials. He praised the city for being “a crossroads of peoples and of communities of every provenance, culture, language, and religion.”

The pastoral visit launched on May 7 with a visit to the historic port town of Aquileia where he was met by thousands of excited Venetians.

The highlight of his 27-hour-trip came when Pope Benedict renowned Mass before an probable congregation of 300,000 on May 8. At the San Giuliano de Mestre Park, the Pope urged the massive crowds to give hope to current man by “listening to and loving the Word of God.”

Official papal photographer recalls time with 'a living saint'

Arturo Mari was Pope John Paul II’s personal photographer for all 27 years of his pontificate. Now, in the days before John Paul’s beatification, Mari has been recalling his life with the late pontiff.

“For me he was a man of God,” Mari tells Associated Press April 28 in an interview conducted in his apartment just yards from the Vatican. “I can guarantee you he was a living saint, because everything I could see with my eyes, hear with my ears, you cannot believe that this man could do so much.”

Many of the images that have come to describe the public image of Pope John Paul’s papacy were captured by Mari; the Pope sunning himself in the mountains of Val D'Aosta, lying in a hospital bed after a 1981 shooting attempt and then meeting and forgiving the Turkish man who shot him.

For Mari there are some exacting moments that typified John Paul the saint. One such instance came in 1984 when the Pope was visiting a leprosy hospital on Sorok Island, South Korea. In a break with the official protocol, “he touched them with his hands, caressed them, kissed each one,” says Mari, “Eight hundred lepers, one by one. One by one!”

Now retired, 71-year-old Mari’s home contains many photographic reminiscences of his time spent with the Pope. He’s particularly enthused by one captured in 2005. It shows John Paul sitting in his private chapel, too sick to attend the traditional Good Friday procession at the Colosseum in person, holding a crucifix as he watched the events on television,

“Look at his hands, the strength of his hands, how he grips the cross!” Mari says, “Look, they're red! He's working really hard. You can see his great suffering, it's like all his life was on that cross.”

Their final gathering came on April 2, 2005, when Mari visited John Paul in his apartment just hours before he died. The Pope, says Mari, was lying on his left side on his bed, an oxygen mask latent on the pillow, “He turned and gave me a smile, and his eyes were enormous. Beautiful! It had been years since I'd seen them like that. He turned, I fell to my knees because the moment, it was stronger than me. He took my hand, he caressed my hand. After a bit he said 'Arturo, grazie, grazie' and turned away.”

Pope Benedict said to have declined immediate canonization for Pope John Paul II

In his first days in office back in 2005, Pope Benedict measured but rejected the instant canonization of Pope John Paul II. That’s the claim being made by Andrea Tornielli, Vatican correspondent with the Italian newspaper La Stampa.

He writes April 27, “Pope Ratzinger did not decide on the spot. He knew his predecessor and had no doubts about his personal holiness. He required to consult first, though, and finally determined to waive the usual waiting period of five years (before opening the cause of canonization) but not to skip the step of beatification.”

Tornielli claims that the suggestion of immediate canonization came from Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, the private secretary to John Paul II. He also states that the idea of not waiting the standard five-year period before opening a cause of canonization was made by the Slovak Cardinal Jozef Tomko, a close friend and intimate of John Paul II.