Poland celebrates sainthood of its most illustrious son

April 28, 2014 - ‎Tens of thousands of Polish Catholics celebrated their country's newest saint, John Paul II on Sunday, ‎by converging on the southern city where he served as cardinal-archbishop before becoming pope. ‎About 50,000 people attended an open-air Mass at the Divine Mercy sanctuary on the outskirts of ‎Krakow. Pope Francis had decided on the April 27 Divine Mercy Sunday as the canonization day of ‎John XXIII and John Paul II, particularly keeping in mind John Paul who as a great apostle and ‎devotee of Divine Mercy instituted the feast on the Sunday after Easter. "Let this moment on this ‎exceptional night and day become the decisive moment at which we begin gathering graces for heaven ‎and our own sanctity," said Auxiliary Bishop Damian Muskus of Krakow at the shrine. Krakow's ‎streets and squares were decorated with posters of Pope John Paul and Polish and Vatican flags. ‎However, festivities were staged nationwide in towns and cities, including the capital, Warsaw. At the ‎Jasna Gora national Marian shrine in Czestochowa, where thousands of pilgrims gathered, Pallotine ‎monks organized a giant telecast of the Vatican canonization ceremony for the homeless. And religious ‎leaders celebrated an outdoor Mass in the Tatra Mountains, where St. John Paul hiked as a youth. St. ‎John Paul II’s birthplace of Wadowice also celebrated the sainthood of its most famous son. Some 500 ‎Wadowice parishioners traveled to Rome with dozens of Polish church and government leaders for the ‎canonization.