c. 2000 Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY _ A weak but resolute Pope John Paul II dedicated his 80th birthday celebrations to the priesthood Thursday (May 18) and said he prays also for priests who have given up their “sublime mission.”
“Dear presbyters of every country and every culture, this is a day entirely dedicated to our priesthood, to the priestly ministry,” the stooped and white-haired Roman Catholic pontiff declared.
Concelebrating with a score of cardinals, John Paul presided over a birthday Mass lasting more than two hours in a sun-baked St. Peter’s Square. Among the tens of thousands of faithful attending the Mass were 7,000 priests, many of them on pilgrimage to Rome for the “Jubilee of the Presbyters.”
“After more than 50 years of the priestly life, I feel alive in me the need to praise and thank God for his immense goodness,” the pope said in his homily during the Mass, which was televised live throughout Europe.
John Paul said he warmly embraced all the “dear priests in the entire world,” especially those who are ill or “tried by various difficulties.”
“I think also of those priests who, for various circumstances, no longer exercise the holy ministry,” the pope said. “I pray a great deal also for them, and I invite everyone to remember them in their prayers so that, thanks also to the dispensation regularly obtained, they may maintain alive in them the commitment to Christian coherence and ecclesial communion.”
The pontiff ended the Mass with a special salute to the priests of Poland, where he was born in the town of Wadowice, worked in a stone quarry and chemical plant and studied secretly for the priesthood during the World War II German occupation.
He was ordained a priest on Nov. 1, 1946, and was archbishop of Krakow when elected on Oct. 16, 1978, as the first non-Italian pope in 455 years.
Following the Mass, the pope sat down to a six-course lunch with 78 cardinals, three Eastern patriarchs and a representative of Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexii II of Moscow in the Casa Santa Marta, a new hotel built inside the Vatican walls to house the cardinals who will meet in conclave after John Paul dies to elect his successor. He invited 11 cardinals age 80 or older to eat at his table.
The day’s celebrations were scheduled to conclude in early evening (noon EDT) with a performance of Haydn’s oratorio “The Creation” by the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus and soloists Carolyn Blackwell, Philip Langridge and Haken Hagegard, directed by Gilbert Levine.
On Friday, John Paul will address ambassadors from the 173 countries and institutions that have diplomatic relations with the Holy See. The most traveled pope in history, he has visited many of the countries on his 92 trips outside Italy over the last 22 years.
Birthday messages arrived at the Vatican from world leaders, including Vladimir Putin, Russia’s new president; German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder; and Presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Ezer Weizman of Israel, Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian National Authority and Carlo Azeglio Campi of Italy.
The messages reflected the role John Paul has played in defending human rights and values. While credited with helping to bring about the collapse of communism through his support of the Solidarity labor union in his native Poland, he is also an outspoken critic of consumerism, globalization and other effects of capitalism that concern him.
The Kremlin said Putin, who will visit Rome and the Vatican soon, told the pope he was sure of “the further development of bilateral Russo-Vatican relations,” which will benefit both sides and “allow the finding of joint solutions for all problems that respond to the interests of all of humanity.”
Alexii II sent a message wishing John Paul “many years of work to witness to Christ risen.” The Russian news agency Interfax said he also expressed “the hope that, thanks to the common efforts of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, existing problems can be resolved successfully and divisions and contradictions among Christians of the East and West be overcome in the new millennium.”
John Paul, who has made ecumenical dialogue a priority of his pontificate, hopes one day to cap his travels with a visit to Moscow.
The pontiff also received two greetings from prisons, one in Rwanda and the other in Italy.
Bishop Augustin Misago, on trial for his life in Rwanda for allegedly collaborating in the 1994 ethnic massacres, asked Archbishop Salvatore Pennacchio, the papal nuncio in Rwanda, to relay his greetings and thanks to the pope for supporting him.
Mehmet Ali Agca, the right-wing Turkish terrorist who shot and seriously wounded the pope in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, sent his greetings from the prison in Ancona where he is serving a life sentence. He has asked the pope to help him win a transfer to a Turkish prison.
(OPTIONAL TRIM _ STORY MAY END HERE)
The Pontifical Council Cor Unum, which coordinates papal charities, invited well-wishers to click on “Happy Birthday John Paul II” on an Internet search engine and at the same time make a donation in the pope’s name to help AIDS orphans in Africa.
There has been speculation in recent months that because of his frail health the pope might take the almost unprecedented step of resigning on his 80th birthday, the age at which cardinals are no longer eligible to vote in a conclave.
In addition to the bullet wounds in his abdomen, he has undergone surgery to remove a pre-cancerous growth in his intestines and to mend a broken thigh, and he suffers from a neurological ailment believed to be Parkinson’s disease, which makes it difficult for him to walk and to speak clearly.
The Vatican has not commented on the speculation, but the pope’s close associates insist that his mind is sharp and he has no intention of retiring.
“He is in great form,” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in a radio interview on the eve of the pope’s birthday. “It seems that the Jubilee has reinvigorated him.
“The pope carries out with joy all the tasks that he has every day. I have dined with him. I have seen how he is really full of energy, of ideas, of surprises. Because he is old and fragile he is, in a sense, also strong. And the more fragile he is humanly, the more he shows himself to be a great pope,” the cardinal said.
DEA END POLK
