Here's my favorite Pope picture....

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'Cause you can never have too many Pope pictures. One of my favorites is the picture I have hanging in my house of our priest kissing the Pope's ring.....

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I have two favourite JPII pictures. The first is when he went to a leper colony in the 80s, and is kissing the leprous face of a child, smiling and completely without fear.

The second is the one of my husband kneeling before the Holy Father, holding his hand, in 2001, at the end of an outdoor Mass at Saint Peter's in Rome. We had only been married a few months. (I still can't believe my husband had an audience with the Pope!!) Clayton never cries, but in this picture you can see a small tear slipping out of his eye. And the Pope is smiling and looking into his eyes.

It amazes me that this man still personally connects with every pilgrim he sees, even while fighting a debilitating illness. We were at WYD in 2002, in Toronto, and we saw him do it over and over again.

We had friends meet him during WYD, and he spoke to one of them in his Aboriginal language, Dogrib. Dobrib is spoken by a few thousand people in Canada's far North. The Holy Father visited there once, in 1987. And he had a hard time learning the basics of the language then. But Ryan says he spoke a sentence in perfect Dogrib. Talk about the gift on tongues!

Happy Birthday, Papa. Long may you shepherd and lead us to holiness in Jesus Christ.

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This page contains a single entry by MamaT published on May 18, 2004 7:12 PM.

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