Pope Approves John Paul II's Miracle

VATICAN CITY - During his 2005 funeral Mass, crowds at the Vatican shouted for Pope John Paul II to be made a saint immediately, chanting "Santo Subito!" for one of the most important and beloved popes in history.

His successor heard their call and on Friday, in the fastest process on record, set May 1 as the date for John Paul's beatification - a key step toward Catholicism's highest honor and a major morale boost for a church reeling from the clerical sex abuse scandal.

Pope Benedict XVI set the date after declaring that a French nun's recovery from Parkinson's disease was the miracle needed for John Paul to be beatified.

CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips reports that, once beatified, John Paul II will be referred to as "blessed," but it will take Vatican approval of at least one more miracle before he can carry the full saint title.

The May 1 ceremony - which Benedict himself will celebrate - is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Rome for a precedent-setting Mass: never before has a pope beatified his immediate predecessor.

Though the numbers aren't expected to necessarily reach the 3 million who flocked here for John Paul's funeral, religious tour operators in his native Poland were already making preparations to bus and fly in the faithful to celebrate a man many considered a saint while alive.

"We have waited a long time and this is a great day for us," said Mayor Ewa Filipiak of John Paul's hometown of Wadowice, Poland, where the faithful lit candles Friday and prayed at a chapel in the town church dedicated to John Paul.

Father Pawel Danek, who runs a museum in John Paul's family home, said Benedict had listened to the prayers of the faithful.

"The Holy Father has confirmed what we all felt somehow," he said. "For us, John Paul II's holiness is obvious."

Benedict put John Paul on the fast track to possible sainthood just weeks after he died, waiving the typical five-year waiting period before the process could begin. But he insisted that the investigation into John Paul's life be thorough to avoid any doubts about his virtues.

The beatification will nevertheless be the fastest on record, coming just over six years after his death and beating out Mother Teresa's then-record beatification in 2003 by a few days.

It is not without controversy, however. While John Paul himself was never accused of improprieties, he has long been accused of responding slowly when the sex abuse scandal erupted in the United States in 2002. Many of the thousands of cases that emerged last year involved crimes and cover-ups that occurred on his 26-year watch.

Critics have faulted John Paul's overriding concern with preserving the rights of accused priests, often at the expense of victims - a concern formed in part by his experiences in Communist-controlled Poland where priests were often accused of trumped up charges by the regime.

The most damaging case linked to John Paul concerned the Rev. Marciel Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a conservative order beloved by the late pope because of its orthodoxy, fundraising prowess and ability to attract priestly vocations.

Allegations that Maciel had raped young seminarians were brought by the victims to the Vatican in the 1990s, but under apparent orders from John Paul's No. 2, a canonical trial was shelved.

Only after Benedict became pope was Maciel sanctioned in 2006; Maciel died two years later.

Despite the Maciel case, Vatican officials have said there was nothing in John Paul's record that put his beatification into question, and Vatican watchers on Friday noted that beatification isn't a "score card" on how John Paul administered the church but rather a recognition that he led a saintly life.

Carl Anderson, head of the Knights of Columbus, one of the world's largest Catholic fraternal service organizations, said John Paul's life was a model of "love, respect and forgiveness for all."

"We saw this in the way he reached out to the poor, the neglected, those of other faiths, even the man who shot him," Anderson said in an e-mail to the AP. "He did all of this despite being so personally affected by events of the bloodiest century in history."

The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano described his saintliness in these terms Friday: "A passionate witness to Christ from his childhood to his last breath."

The last remaining hurdle before beatification concerned Benedict's approval that the cure of French nun, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, was a miracle due to the intercession of the late pope.

The nun has said she felt reborn when she woke up two months after John Paul died, cured of the disease that had made walking, writing and driving a car nearly impossible. She and her fellow sisters of the Congregation of Little Sisters of Catholic Maternity Wards had prayed to John Paul, who also suffered from Parkinson's.

On Friday, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre said John Paul was and continues to be an inspiration to her because of his defense of the unborn and because they both suffered from Parkinson's.

John Paul "hasn't left me. He won't leave me until the end of my life," she told French Catholic TV station KTO and Italy's state-run RAI television.

Wearing a white habit and wire-rimmed glasses, she appeared in good health and showed no signs of tremors or slurred speech which are common symptoms of Parkinson's.

"John Paul II did everything he could for life, to defend life," she said. "He was very close to the smallest and weakest. How many times did we see him approach a handicapped person, a sick person?"

Last year, there were some questions about whether the nun's original diagnosis was correct. But in a statement Friday, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints said Vatican-appointed doctors had "scrupulously" studied the case and determined that her cure had no scientific explanation.

Once he is beatified, John Paul will be given the title "blessed" and can be publicly venerated. Many people, especially in Poland, already venerate him privately, but the ceremony will make it official.

Born in Wadowice in 1920, Karol Wojtyla was the youngest pope in 125 years and the first non-Italian in 455 years when he was elected pope in 1978.

He brought a new vitality to the Vatican, and quickly became the most accessible modern pope, sitting down for meals with factory workers, skiing and wading into crowds to embrace the faithful.

His Polish roots nourished a doctrinal conservatism - opposition to contraception, euthanasia, abortion and women priests - that rankled liberal Catholics in the United States and Western Europe.

But his common touch also made him a crowd-pleasing, globe-trotting superstar whose 26-year papacy carried the Catholic Church into Christianity's third millennium and emboldened eastern Europeans to bring down the communist system.

He survived an assassination attempt in St. Peter's Square in 1981 - and promptly forgave the Turk who had shot him.

After suffering for years from the effects of Parkinson's, he died in his Vatican apartment on April 2, 2005, at the age of 84.

Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul's most trusted friend and aide who was at his bedside that night, gave thanks on Friday from Krakow, where he is archbishop.

"We are happy that this process came to an end, that what people asked for - "Santo Subito" - was fulfilled," Dziwisz said. "I express great joy on behalf of the entire diocese of Krakow - and I think I am also authorized to express this on behalf of all of Poland."

The selection of May 1 as the beatification date is significant: It's the Feast of Divine Mercy - a feast day John Paul himself inaugurated in 2000 after canonizing Sister Faustina Kowalska, a 20th-century Polish mystic to whom he was particularly devoted.

It's also May Day or labor day, what was once a major Communist holiday before John Paul helped bring down the Iron Curtain in Europe. While there was some irony in the date, few in Poland noted it and Poles today celebrate May 1 as a welcome and uncontroversial holiday like the rest of Europe.