WARSAW – St. John Paul II was honored on the centennial of his birth with special Masses at the Vatican and in his native Poland on Monday, an anniversary that comes as the Polish church finds itself shaken by new allegations of sexual abuse by clerics.
From the small town of Wadowice, Poland, where Karol Wojtya was born on May 18, 1920, to Warsaw and the Vatican, Catholic faithful gave prayers of thanks for the man who was pope from 1978 until his death in 2005. “Today we can say that 100 years ago the Lord visited his people," Pope Francis said in a morning Mass in St.
Peter's Basilica. “Celebrating the memory of Saint John Paul II let’s remember this: the Lord loves his people, he visited his people, he sent a shepherd.” To Poles, John