And Finding an Old Friend

Meeting Jim Kimball in a cross walk in Hong Kong seemed extraordinary at the time, but I have now come to expect this sort of thing in life. Still, when it happens it always catches you by suprise.

As a young missionary in Rio Cuarto, Argentina, I lived in the Barrio Juan Pablo XXIII, the neighborhood John Paul XXIII. Having lived in a neighborhood named in his honor, I have always felt a particular connection with this recently beatified Pope (he became a saint in the year 2000, just 27 years after his death). Had I thought about it, I would have known he was somewhere in the Vatican - that's where they bury old Popes. But who thinks about these things? And even if I had thought about, don't they bury those Popes deep in the vaults, with just a marker on the floor or something, like at Westminster Abbey?

Of course, I didn't think about it, so it was with a great deal of suprise and gratification that I finally met the so-callled "good Pope" (as compared to some others?) in the Vatican this month. It turns out that following his beatification, his body was moved from its original burial place in the grottoes below St. Peter's basilica to the altar of St. Jerome and displayed for the veneration of the faithful. At the time, the body was observed to be extremely well-preserved—a condition which the Church ascribes officially to the lack of oxygen in his sealed triple coffin rather than to any miraculous event (although it was certainly seen as such by many of the faithful). So there he was, in the flesh.

You never know who you might run into in the Vatican.