• Submitted by: manso
• International
• 05 / 02 / 2011

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Echoing the festivities in Rome, South Florida Catholics gathered Sunday to honor the late pope, to whom miracles have been attributed.

BY DANIEL SHOER ROTH. ElNuevoHerald.com. On the day when hundreds of millions of Catholics throughout the world celebrated the elevation of Pope John Paul II to the ranks of the beatified, Robert Reyes joined the festivities Sunday, carrying an effigy of the pontiff from his home altar to an afternoon Mass in Miami as a symbol to remember the “traveling Pope.”

Reyes says he owes his eyesight to the miraculous intercession of John Paul II.

“We have always venerated John Paul II, though out of respect we had not divulged it,” said Reyes, 31, during the ceremony held at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Charity in Coconut Grove. “Now that he has been beatified I can give testimony that he performed a miracle on me.”

Hundreds of faithful South Florida Catholics like Reyes joined on Sunday the masses organized by the Archdiocese of Miami to remember the pope who left his mark in our region during his historic visit in September 1987.

At the feet of the image of La Vírgen de la Caridad del Cobre, which was taken out of the shrine and with the Biscayne Bay shores as a backdrop, the devotees sang their worship to John Paul II with religious fervor, read biblical passages of the Second Sunday of Easter, and evoked the legacy of the newly beatified pope.

During his sermon, the Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski remembered that throughout his papacy John Paul II worked constantly to defend life, promote justice and pursue peace, while at the same time applying Catholic moral principles to the pressing problems of his time.

“He led the Church’s opposition to abortion and euthanasia, cloning and capital punishment,” Wenski said. “He worked tirelessly for peace in the Middle East and religious freedom around the world.”

In Cuba and as part of the ceremony, a ceramic mural was unveiled outside the sanctuary with an image of John Paul II and the mountains surrounding Santiago de Cuba and the Basílica of El Cobre in the background.

John Paul II’s beatification coincided with another commemoration related to a female saint, also from Poland, in whose honor the Pope declared the Second Sunday of Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday.

In 2000 John Paul II canonized Sister Faustina Kowalska, a nun who had devoted her life to the mystery of Jesus Christ’s divine mercy, as the first saint of the new millennium, Wenski said during the homily. John Paul died on April 2, 2005, a day before the 2005 celebration of Divine Mercy Sunday.

“John Paul II himself beatified and canonized more saints than any other pope in history, he added.

Six years after his death, it was his turn to be beatified for the miraculous healing of the French nun Marie Simon-Pierre, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Now the faithful are waiting for another miracle to be certified in order to finalize John Paul II’s canonization and, with it, declaring him worthy of universal veneration.

Reyes, a pharmacy technician who lives in Southwest Miami-Dade, believes John Paul II will be easily certified because he has seen it in his own life. He suffered from a pathological myopia, and the retina was about to separate from one of his eyes.

While John Paul II was alive and Reyes was watching a story about the Pope on television, he knelt and felt “something hot was entering his eyes.” Weeks later, he had been cured, he said.

“To have so many people in the world join in a celebration today is a good enough miracle to make him a saint,” Reyes said.

Source: //www.miamiherald.com/2011/05/01/2196175/