Why John Paul II’s Coffin Was Opened After His De.ath

Why John Paul II’s Coffin Was Opened After His Death

In 2011, six years after the death of John Paul II, a dozen or so cardinals gathered at dawn in the basement of St. Peter’s Basilica.  No one photographed them, no one broadcast this moment live.  In the silence of the Vatican city, and with the light of a few candles, a special crane slowly lifted from the ground something that had not been touched for six years.

  The coffin, closed, sealed, wrapped in red ribbons with the seals of the apostolic chamber, emerged from its resting place as something that should not be disturbed.  Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, who for 40 years stood by Karol Wojtyła’s side, who held his hand on the night of the assassination, who received his final blessing, who closed his eyes at the moment of death, watched this in silence.

  then he said only one sentence.  It is impossible to describe with what emotion I participated in this act, but why was it done at all? Why did a man buried with the highest honors, placed in three coffins, sealed with Vatican lead, have to be dug out of the ground after six years ?  Why did the Church, an institution built on faith, not evidence, need anything more than the memory of millions of the faithful who, after the Pope’s death, shouted in St.

 Peter’s Square: “Santo subito! Saint immediately.”  The answer to this question requires going back not only to the day of John Paul II’s death, but much further, to a May morning in a small Polish town, when the Litany of Loreto was sung through an open church window , and a boy was being born whose mother knew she might not survive him.

  Wadowice May 18, 1920.  Emilia Wojtyłowa knew she was risking her life.  The doctors told her this clearly.  Her heart and kidneys were too weak.  Pregnancy was a threat that the medicine of the time could not control.   A year earlier she had lost her newborn daughter, Olga.  The girl lived only 16 hours, and yet Emilia refused.

She didn’t want to get rid of the baby.  It was a simple and absolute decision, made without hesitation, rooted in a faith so deep that no medical argument could reach it.  When Karol Józef Wojtyła was born, the sound of church bells came through the open windows. His father, a retired lieutenant in the Polish army, a taciturn, strict man with a strongly developed sense of duty, immediately took his son to a nearby church to immerse his feet in the water drawn from the feet of the image of the Virgin Mary .  It was a gesture of cio, which

had its significance in Wadowice.  Putting a child in the care of something higher before life had a chance to hurt them hurt quickly.  Karol was 9 years old when his mother died.  Emilia Wojtyłowa, the same woman who chose a child’s life over her own, passed away on April 13, 1929, at the age of 45.

  The diagnosis was dry, inflammation of the heart and kidneys.  The father was so shocked that he was unable to tell his son about her death. he asked the teacher to do it. Little Lolek, as he was called at home, did not cry in public.  Neighbors and teachers recalled that he was very focused afterwards, very quiet, as if he had understood something that children his age should not yet understand.

  After the funeral, his father took him to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Kalwaria. They prayed together and this image, the stern soldier and the nine-year-old boy, kneeling together before the image, seeking silence and solace where there is no rational explanation for the pain, is perhaps the key to understanding everything that followed.  But fate did not end there.

Three years after his mother’s death, Charles was 12 years old when his older brother Edmund died. Edmund was a doctor, young, talented, liked by everyone.  He worked in a hospital in Bielsko.  He was the type of man who would not say no to those in need, even when he should have said no for his own good.

  He contracted scarlet fever from a patient with whom he stayed awake day and night when no one else wanted to sit at her bedside.  He was 26 years old.  He died on December 4,  1932.  John Paul II later recalled that his brother’s death was perhaps even more deeply etched in his heart than his mother’s.  With Edward he lost more than just someone close to him .

  He had lost a companion, a role model, a window onto the wider world.  Of the entire family, only the two of them, father and son, remained. alone at the Christmas Eve table in an apartment where the shadows of those who were not there were moving.  There are no records from this period that show that Karol Wojtyła ever rebelled against God.

  No screaming in the night, no recitation of prayer, no philosophical protest.  What was happening was different and deeper. Transforming pain into something that could only be endured within the framework of faith.  The father prayed on his knees in the middle of the night. Karol would sometimes wake up and see him in this position.

  They didn’t talk much to each other, but that image of the man kneeling in the dark room alone after losing everything spoke more than a thousand words. Karol Wojtyła grew into a man who does not ask God why, who accepts suffering not as proof of God’s absence, but as part of some plan that he does not have to understand.  It wasn’t naive.

  This was something much more difficult.  A conscious, mature decision to live without the certainty that everything is fair and to renew these decisions every day.  When  his father died in February 1941, Karol was 21 years old and was left completely alone.  Everyone he loved passed away before he finished college.  Mother, sister, brother, father.

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he was the only survivor of his family, and the war raged around him.  Krakow was under occupation.  His Jewish school friends  disappeared one by one.  The Germans shot people in the streets.  In the same year, not a few months after his father’s death, Karol Wojtyła decided to enter the seminary .  It wasn’t simple.

  The seminaries operated underground.  By joining he risked arrest.  But this decision, made in the middle of the night during the occupation after losing all his loved ones, says something fundamental about this man, that it was precisely in moments when his faith demanded the greatest price that he deepened it, not abandoned it.

  He didn’t look for evidence, he didn’t need guarantees.  He lived by faith as one lives by air.  Not because someone had proven it to him, but because without it he wouldn’t be able to breathe.  He carried this attitude with him throughout his life, through his priesthood in post-war Krakow, through his years as a bishop when he fought the communist regime for the faithful’s right to religion, and through his pontificate when he became one of the most powerful moral voices of the 20th century.

  For and through the assassination attempt in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, when Ali Akca’s bullet pierced his body and John Paul II, taken to hospital with an open wound, asked for a rosary.  and began to pray before the doctors could put him to sleep for the operation. Then, when he had recovered, he visited the ac in his cell.

  He sat opposite him, face to face.  He spoke to him as a human being, not as a criminal, and forgave him publicly and privately.  It wasn’t a political gesture.  It was something deeper.  The consequence of a lifetime spent believing that mercy is more important than justice.  This man, this particular, complex, astonishing man, was to become, after his death, the subject of the coldest, most bureaucratic trial ever conducted by the Catholic Church.

   A process in which faith is not enough, in which evidence is needed.  April 2, 2005, 9:37 p.m., Papal Apartment in the Apostolic Palace.  The silence was broken only by singing coming from St. Peter’s Square, where over 100,000 people were praying the rosary.  On the bed, the man who had been head of the Catholic Church for 27 years , the man who had shaken billions of hands, who had flown to every continent, who had endured assassination, torture, Parkinson’s disease and dozens of surgeries, lay completely still.  On his chest he wore a scapular

and a gold cross with relics of saints.  He held a rosary on his hand, which was bruised from numerous needle punctures.  Earlier that day, while he was still able to speak, he had asked for the Gospel of Saint John to be read to him. In the evening he asked for Mass to be said at his bedside.  He received a few drops of the Eucharist.

Around 3:30 p.m., in a weak voice, he uttered the last words of his pontificate: Let me go to my father’s house.  At 7:00 p.m. he lost consciousness.  The monitor showed a progressive decline in vital functions.   His personal physician, Dr. Renato Buzonetti, pronounced him dead at 9:37 p.m. In accordance with Vatican protocol, the electrocardiogram was turned off only after 20 minutes.

Present in the room was Archbishop Stanisław Dziwisz, who had accompanied him for 40 years as his secretary.  Father Professor Tadeusz Styczeń, his student from the Catholic University of Lublin, three Polish Sisters of the Sacred Heart who took care of the papal apartment every day, and several doctors.

  Outside the window the crowd sang and kept watch.  There was a dead silence in the square , then the bells rang.  First, in the Vatican, the death bell, which the Italians call the Campanone de la Morte.  Then in churches all over Rome, then in Poland, where the Sigismund Bell in Wawel Castle tolled for 25 minutes, and in the streets of Polish cities people knelt and cried.

  The day after the Pope’s death, a banner handwritten in Italian appeared in St. Peter’s Square  .  Two words that have become the slogan of millions.  Santo Subito, saint immediately.  This demand came from the faithful, spontaneous, massive, impossible to ignore.  But the Church has its rules and these rules say something unexpected.

  That wanting to canonize someone is not enough, that believing in someone’s holiness is not enough.  That even a death with a reputation for holiness, even a million people crying, even 40 years of pontificate, is not enough.  The Church requires something more.  The Church requires proof. What followed the death of John Paul II is one of the most astonishing paradoxes in the history of the Catholic Church.

   An institution founded on the belief in things invisible and unverifiable has created a canonization mechanism that is one of the most rigorous investigative processes humanity has ever devised.  more scrupulous than many courts, more cautious than many scientific proceedings.  For the church to officially declare someone a saint, it must prove a miracle.

  Eyewitness accounts are not enough .  The fervent prayer of thousands of people is not enough.  Even the sincere conviction of the Pope himself is not enough. Need medical records.  You need an independent assessment by doctors.  First specialists, then a commission of congregation experts, then the verdict of theologians is needed.  and at the end of the decision of the Pope, who is the last instance and the only man on earth authorized to declare someone a saint.

John Paul II himself reformed these regulations.  In 1983, as pope, he issued an apostolic constitution regulating canonization processes.  He himself established the rule of five years’ waiting from the moment of the candidate’s death. Now these regulations were to be applied to him, but with a shortcut, because Benedict XV had waived the waiting period in May 2005, just 42 days after the funeral.

  The postulator of the beatification process, the man whose task was to collect all the documentation and conduct an investigation into the sanctity of John Paul II, was a Polish priest named Sławomir Oder, a doctor of both laws working at the Tribunal of the Vicariate of Rome, experienced in canonization procedures like few others.

  It was he who, on June 28, 2005, at a  table covered with gray cloth in the Lateran Basilica, submitted a formal request to the tribunal to legally begin the process.  All present took the oath.  The words of this oath are cold and precise. Putting aside all consideration of persons, I will faithfully and diligently fulfill the task entrusted to me.

  I will keep witness statements confidential.  I will not accept any kind of gifts offered on the occasion of the trial.  So help me God. No respect for persons.  I will faithfully and carefully keep the secret.  The man who had headed the church for 40 years was now a person, a candidate for sainthood, whose holiness had to be proven.  Don’t assume, prove.

Over the following months, tribunals in Rome and Krakow questioned witnesses, collected documents, analyzed writings, and examined every detail of the life of the man who himself reformed the rules of this procedure.   A total of approximately 120 people were interviewed. A record number of canonization processes in the history of the world .

  Among the witnesses were his colleagues, friends, and doctors.  There were also politicians.  Wojciech Jaruzelski, Lech Wałęsa, Aleksander Kwaśniewski.  People who knew him from different sides, in different contexts, at different moments in history.  And then, in the course of this process, something came to light that the world did not know.

  Something that shows that a man who lived in the spotlight for almost three decades, a man photographed, filmed, quoted at every turn, was able to keep one deeply hidden secret to himself .  Two people testified under oath before the tribunal that John Paul II regularly flagellated himself.  The belt found in the Pope’s desk, the marks on his skin, his mortification practices, which he told no one about, and which were so intense that they left physical marks.

  A man who showed the world joy and openness, who cried out: “Do not be afraid!”  and embraced thousands.  Alone in his room at night, he silently inflicted pain on himself.  Not out of masochism, out of faith, out of the conviction that voluntary suffering has meaning, that it connects it with the suffering of Christ, that penance is something real and tangible, not only spiritual.

  Postulator Oder commented on this calmly.  This practice, although unknown to many, has a long tradition in the church and is not surprising in itself . But the fact that John Paul II, this John Paul II whom the world knew as a lively, sporty, smiling man, practiced it until the last years of his life, shed a new and unexpected light on the whole process .

  Because this man was not a figure.  he was someone deeper and more complex than all the portraits that have been made of him.  And it was precisely such a complex, human, full of contradictions man who was now to pass through a machine that checks not the soul, but the documents.  Not intentions, but medical protocols, not faith, but evidence.  This is what the Church required.

  This was required by the system that John Paul II himself perfected and strengthened throughout his life. And then, in the midst of this trial, as the tribunals were taking testimony and the medical commissions were poring over the files of the sick healed through his intercession, news arrived from France that was to change everything.

  Sister Marie Simon Pier Normand, the French, Parkinson’s disease, advanced stage and something that doctors could not explain. But to understand what really happened to this woman and why her story became the focal point of the entire process, we must first understand the paradox that lies at the heart of canonization. The institution of faith demands proof, and it is precisely this paradox, contained in a few words , that is why, on that morning in 2011, as John Paul II’s coffin emerged from its resting place in the basement of the basilica,

Cardinal Dziwisz was unable to speak.  He could only watch and remain silent.  France, June 2005, two months after the death of John Paul II, Sister Mary Simon Pier Normand was 44 years old and could no longer hold a pen. Parkinson’s disease attacked her in 2001. It started on the left side of the body. Tremors, stiffness, pain, insomnia.

   A detail that did not escape anyone’s attention. Mari was left-handed. The disease hit exactly where she worked.  She couldn’t write, she couldn’t drive.  She could barely stay on her feet.  She worked in the maternity ward, surrounded by birth, life, new beginnings, and was slowly losing the ability to do every activity her job required.

  For four years she watched John Paul II lead the celebrations on television.  Slower and slower, more and more bent, more and more trembling.  She saw herself in him in a few years.  She had to look away.  When the Pope died on April 2, 2005, Marie felt, according to her own words, that a friend had died, and that same day her condition worsened, as if her body had reacted to mourning in the only way it knew how , by exacerbating every symptom.

 The religious community, the Little Sisters of Catholic Motherhood, began to pray, not to John Paul II as a saint, because the beatification process was just beginning, but through his intercession.  It’s a subtle but important difference.  A prayer addressed to God by someone who may already be close to him.  On May 26, Mary returned from a short vacation.

  She was, she said, completely exhausted.  She went to her superior and asked to be relieved of her duties.  She no longer had the strength to stand.   The superior asked her to wait a little longer until she returned from Lourdes in August and said something that Mari remembered.  John Paul II has not said his last word yet.

   On June 2nd in the evening between 9:30 and 9:45 p.m., Sister Mari was sitting alone in her room.  Suddenly, according to her, she felt the urge to pick up a pen and write. As if someone were telling her: “Take a pen and write.”  She took it.  The writing was clear and legible with her left hand, the same hand she had been unable to control for four years .

  She didn’t immediately understand what was happening.  She went to sleep.  At 4:30 in the morning she woke up.  The body did not hurt.  There was no stiffness, no tremors.   She got out of bed, normally, without struggling, without holding on to the wall.  She went to the chapel.  On the way she noticed that she was moving her left arm.  Freely.

  The arm that had hung at her side like a burden for four years.  During mass she was sure.  She wrote a letter that same day. She called her superior, showed her her letter, and told her that she had been healed through the intercession of John Paul II.  The superior asked her to write two words again slowly and clearly .  John Paul II.  Mari wrote.

   They both looked at the paper in silence.   On June 7, Mari went to a previously scheduled appointment with the neurologist who had been treating her for years.  Then the doctor saw him enter the office.  With a confident step, moving both arms freely. He asked if she had taken a double dose of dopamine.

  Marie replied that she had stopped taking the medication completely and explained what had happened.  The doctor was surprised.  He didn’t say it was a miracle. He said that from a medical point of view he did not understand what had happened.  And this very sentence, I don’t understand what happened, is the sentence that the Church is waiting to hear.

Not every healing is enough.  The Church has a precise definition of a medical miracle, developed by generations of theologians and physicians working together in the Congregation for the Causes of Saints .  The healing must be immediate, complete, perfect, clinically permanent and, above all, medically inexplicable.

Each of these words is important.  Not all of them exclude dozens of cases that do not meet all the conditions simultaneously. The case of Sister Mary Simon Pierre came to the desk of Postulator Odder. For a year, from March 2006 to March 2007, a special diocesan tribunal operated in France .

  The nun herself was interrogated .  15 witnesses were heard. The opinions of three independent medical experts were heard.  Every inch of her documentation was analyzed.  Diagnoses, tests, prescriptions, EEG results, CT scans, neurologist’s notes, medical history.  But then something unexpected happened. When the files were sent to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome, the Medical Commission did not meet immediately.

Questions and doubts arose. Neurologist after neurologist looked at the documentation and asked the same question. Are you sure it was Parkinson’s disease? Couldn’t it be Parkinson’s syndrome, a condition with similar symptoms but a different etiology, which can regress spontaneously in certain circumstances? Parkinson’s disease is incurable.

Parkinson’s syndrome was not always a crack at the heart of the process.  If the nun had not Parkinson’s, but something that only looked like Parkinson’s, then her recovery would not be a miracle, it would simply be remission.  For almost a year, the Congregation’s Medical Commission could not meet because several key expert opinions were missing.

  Top-class specialists from around the world were consulted individually, in an atmosphere of complete discretion.  What was supposed to be the shortest stage of the trial turned out to be its most difficult moment. Rumors began to circulate in the media.  It was said that Marie had fallen ill again.  They said the diagnosis was wrong from the start.

  C it was said that the church would have to look for another miracle.  No official comments.  Silence.  And in this silence, the tiny coffin of John Paul II rested undisturbed in the Vatican grottoes.  And the millions of faithful who shouted in Santo Subito waited, not knowing that their pope’s case now depended on what a few neurologists would write in their reports.

   In the summer of 2010, Marie Simonpier was summoned to the Vatican.  She underwent additional neurological and psychiatric examinations.  The idea was to ultimately rule out all alternative explanations.  Five years after her recovery, tests confirmed what her doctor had said in June 2005 .

  No symptoms, no traces of disease, no relapse.  On January 14, 2011, Pope Benedict XV signed a decree recognizing a miracle through the intercession of John Paul II.  Two weeks later, the beatification date was set for May 1, 2011.  Divine Mercy Sunday.   A holiday established by John Paul II himself on the eve of his death.  And then on April 29, 2011, days before the beatification of Jesus, in the Vatican grottoes the scene from the beginning of our story took place .  Coffin crane.

  Cardinal Dziwisz.  who couldn’t speak.  Eight cardinals in silence.  A ceremony that was not a public display of the body , but a necessary legal and liturgical act, the transfer of the mortal remains from a place of anonymous burial to a new grave worthy of the blessed.  The coffin was not opened, there was no examination of the body, and no signs of incorruptibility were sought.

  It was a gesture of a different kind.  Transfer from the darkness of the grottoes to the light of the basilica, from the place of the dead to the place of the saints.  In the history of the Church, such an act of translation has for centuries been tantamount to canonization.  Now he was just its precursor.

   On May 1, 2011, one and a half million people gathered in St. Peter’s Square .  In front of the main altar stood the coffin of John Paul II, the same cypress coffin that had lain on the stone steps of the basilica six years earlier when Racinger celebrated a funeral mass.  The words sounded different now.

  Benedict XV declared Karol Wojtyła blessed. Applause broke out in the square.  People who didn’t even cry at a funeral were crying, because then they were saying goodbye to someone, now they were welcoming someone who, according to the church, is closer to God than ever.  Mary’s sister Simon Pier entered the square with the reliquary.

  She carried an ampoule of John Paul II’s blood, blood collected in the last days of his life, enclosed in glass and surrounded by gold.  The woman whose disease receded overnight carried the blood of a man whose disease never receded.  It’s unclear if she was thinking about it at the time, but the symmetry is too obvious to miss .

  But beatification is not canonization, it is only halfway there. For John Paul II to be declared a saint, officially and definitively for all eternity, a second miracle was needed.  And this second miracle came from a place where no one expected it.  Costa Rica, May 1, 2011.  Night.  Flor Betas was 48 years old and had one month to live according to doctors.

  Her husband Edwin sat on the porch of their home near San Jose, praying the rosary.  He built a small altar dedicated to John Paul II.  The Pope visited Costa Rica in 1983 and Edwin never forgot it. Floribet was lying in the bedroom.  The left side of the body was paralyzed. Two weeks earlier, after a sudden headache, a CT scan revealed a fusiform aneurysm of the middle cerebral artery.

  located in a place where surgery was not available.  Neurosurgeon Alejandro Wargas Roman told the family bluntly: ” There is no surgery that can be performed. We can only relieve the pain. When the artery bursts, it will happen quickly.” Floribet took strong medications that caused deep sleep.  The doctor explained to her that it was better for her to be unconscious when it ruptured.

  Her children would come at night and touch her, checking if she was still breathing. They knew he could die in his sleep. That evening of May 1, 2011, at the very moment when the beatification of John Paul II was taking place in St. Peter’s Square , Floribet was watching a television broadcast in her room.

  She was barely conscious.  The drugs were strong, the screen flickered in the darkness.  She was looking at a picture of the Pope and, according to her account, saw his hands reaching out towards her from the picture.  she heard a voice, two sentences in Polish, which she understood even though she had never spoken the language.

  Get up, don’t be afraid .  She got up and got out of bed. Alone, without help, she went to the kitchen where Edwin was.  Her husband looked at her in silence.  She hasn’t been able to get up on her own for the past few weeks .  Florbet said: “I am healthy.” Tests conducted several months later showed that the aneurysm had disappeared.

The artery looked as if nothing had ever happened to it.  Dr. Wargas Roman, who worked as a neurosurgeon for over a dozen years and saw hundreds of tomography scans, told journalists one sentence. I have found no scientific basis to explain why the aneurysm disappeared. If it is a miracle, then the church has a say in the matter .

  And he added because he was a Catholic.  I believe this, but the church couldn’t say it for itself. The Church had to check.  Floribet arrived in Rome in October 2012 .  She arrived discreetly.  At the Gemeli Clinic, she was registered under a false name as a tourist who had fallen ill while on holiday. Italian doctors conducted a full package of neurological tests.

The results confirmed what doctors in Costa Rica had said.  The aneurysm disappeared.   There are no traces.  The artery is healthy. Postulator Oder personally went to Costa Rica.  He asked the Archbishop of San Jose to establish a local canonical tribunal.  On November 20, 2012, the Tribunal of Three Priests, a notary and a doctor, began its work.

  For months, documentation was collected, witnesses were interviewed , and every stage of the illness and recovery was analyzed.  In January 2013, the entire collection was delivered to the Vatican.  The Congregation for the Causes of Saints conducted its own investigation.  A commission of doctors, a commission of theologians, a commission of cardinals and bishops.

  Three stages, three independent assessments.  Same question three times.  Can what happened to Flori Bedmora Dias be explained naturally? Same answer three times.  NO.  On July 5, 2013, Pope Francis signed a decree recognizing the healing of Costa Rica as a miracle through the intercession of John Paul II. The road to canonization was opened on April 27, 2014, Divine Mercy Sunday.

Over 800,000 faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square .  In the procession in front of the altar, Floribet Mora Dias carried a reliquary with the blood of John Paul II.  behind her sister Maris and Monpier Normand, the same one who three years earlier stood in the same place with the same ampoule.

  Two women, two illnesses, two nights where something turned around in ways science couldn’t explain.  They carried the blood of a man who had believed for 40 years without evidence and whose holiness had to be proven by those who sought evidence.  Pope Francis pronounced the canonization formula in Latin.

  After the ceremony, a portrait was unveiled on the façade of St. Peter’s Basilica, and the crowd that had been waiting for this moment for nine years began to shout: “No, Santo Subito, not anymore. Now it was different. Now they simply shouted his name. What is a relic then? What is a coffin that must be opened for a person to become a saint? It is a gesture that says something that words cannot fully express: that the body counts, that matter matters.

 That what is tangible and sensual is the carrier of something that transcends matter. In the Chapel of St. Sebastian in St. Peter’s Basilica, right next to Michelangelo’s famous Pietà , a few meters from where, according to tradition, Peter himself rests, John Paul II’s coffin lies behind a white marble slab.

 You cannot see it. You can only stand by it and know it is there. Every year, millions of people come to do just that. They stand, remain silent, pray. Or they look at the white slab without any prayer, simply standing, simply being close. The blood of Karol Wojtyła  Wojtyła’s remains are in over 100 churches and chapels around the world.

In Poland, Italy, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, and in an ampoule 101 meters underground, in the Wieliczka Salt Mine chapel . A shot-through belt from his cassock, with traces of his blood from the assassination attempt, lies in the sanctuary at Jasna Góra. A man who doesn’t ask God why became a man whose remains now raise millions of questions.

 But there is one question no commission has ever answered. Marie Simon Pierre, asked by journalists whether she actually had Parkinson’s disease, and not just similar symptoms, replied calmly. “I don’t know if it’s a miracle. The church had to decide that. I only know that I was sick. I prayed to John Paul II, and my illness disappeared.” Dr.

Wargas Roman, who examined Floribet after returning from the Gemeli Clinic, when asked what he thought as a doctor, repeated the same thing. There is no explanation. Asked what he thought as a human being, he said, “I believe.” And Sister Marie  She once wrote a sentence in a letter that never made it to any commission, report, or decree.

 What you allowed me to experience is something I cannot express in words. I feel as if I were born a second time. She was born a second time at night in the darkness when she picked up a pen and began writing legibly with her left hand, which she had not controlled for four years . John Paul II was born for the first time on May 18, 1920, while the chanting of the Litany of Loreto drifted through the open windows .

 He was born a second time according to the faith of the Church on April 27, 2014, when Pope Francis pronounced the canonization formula. Between these two births, one life filled to the brim with loss, faith, suffering, love, and questions, because no one answered them, and one church that believes, but before declaring anything, must first verify it.

 The paradox does not disappear. It simply becomes part of history, and that is why the coffin had to be opened. If the story of John Paul II, a man who believed his entire life without proof, and after  death had to be confirmed by evidence, moved you deeply, then in the next episode you’ll learn something even harder to believe.

 Because what happened to another pope after his death, John 23, whose coffin lay dormant for 40 years, and what was found inside it, changes everything you think about time, decay, and holiness. Stay with us. If this episode resonated with you, leave a comment. If it took away your certainty about the limits of faith and science, leave a like and subscribe so you don’t miss what happens next, because these questions are endless.

M.