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...is about to start. Just an hour away. And I've just been banished from the room with the cable TV. *sigh* Shame it's on so late. I wonder if the networks will show it tomorrow afternoon? Probably just snips.
Maybe I can go over to a friend's house and watch it there.
[ April 08, 2005, 07:09 AM: Message edited by: Telperion the Silver ]
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It's 7am and I haven't gone to bed. The Requiem Mass was so beautiful...I can't even discribe it. The crowd broke all tradition and cheered! Several times! And then the Eastern Orthodox priests and reps came to offer their rituals and prayers. WOW. Unification really seems possible.
And at the end, after the Cardinals filed into the Basilica, they marched the Pope's coffin up to the great door...turned him around to face the people... and everybody goes bananas! Chanting for John Paul II to be made a Saint...right then and there.
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Last night my six month old daughter woke me up at 3 am. She hasn't done that in a long time. She kept me up for 45 minutes, and the only thing on TV was the Pope's funeral. I think I caught the part with the Eastern Orthodox clergy, which I thought was cool. Still, my daughter found it quite dull, and went back to sleep. Thank goodness.
I thought plain-ish wooden coffin was kind of cool.
I also had to laugh at the way the wind was whipping all the clergymen's robes and trappings around. There were even a couple of gofer types who were assigned to stand behind the more heavily draped participants and smooth their robes back down when they got too out of hand.
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posted
Maybe I'm a little confused on what a saint is then. I thought they were folks deemed to have been close enough to Christlike to get to intercede for the rest of us.
If the Pope is the guy who best represents God's love for us here on earth, wouldn't that make sainthood a bit redundant? I don't know. I guess I thought either they all would be or none of them would.
Ok, from Morbo's spiffy link to the Catholic Encyclopedia I think I see the difference. The Pope is the guy in charge of Rome. Since Rome is the center of the Church, he's in charge of the Church. Saints are folks who lived really special lives and are now declared to be God's friends and servants in Heaven. (Several Popes were also Blessed, which are like Saints but only to one area, not the whole Church. I'm a little fuzzy on that, but there's apparently an important difference.)
Some things I thought were cool. There have been 265 Popes in the Church's history. The Pope right after Peter was Linus, which explains a few things about Peanuts. The 28th Pope was Caius, also called Gaius. He was the Pope from 283 to 296 and died before a large persecution started. Makes me wonder about Gaius in Battlestar Galactica. The first thirty-five Popes were all Saints. It must have hurt to be Liberius, the first Pope to not be a Saint. On the other hand, in the last hundred years, we've had one Saint and a Blessed as Pope. Just some things I thought were neat.
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