SAINTED POPES | Two More, Video (Comment, Updated Feb. 12, 2016)

Olga receiving Communion from Pope
John Paul II in 1980. Nairobi, Kenya.

April 27, 2014–A CNN video of the canonizations of Pope John XIII and Pope John Paul II today is here. They are the 81st and 82nd sainted popes, and are #41 and #42 on the alphabetical list below.

(You may find, as I did, that the video is preceded by a bilingual advertisement, a blessedly short one, in which dogs are used to try to sell car insurance.  Sorry about that.)

The 82 popes who have been canonized represent 30.8 percent of the 266 elected to date by the College of Cardinals. The 82 are heavily weighted at the front end, including all of the first 35 and 52 out of the first 54. In addition to the 82 officially proclaimed saints–after facing an advocatus diaboli (Counsel for the Devil), who presents the negative aspects of each candidate–there remain 16 popes in, as it were, the pipeline having passed the first hurdle of beatification.

Here are the certified papal saints. As an alumnus of two Benedictine schools (Ampleforth and Portsmouth Abbeys), I was disappointed to see only one of 16 popes named after Benedict on the list, although the popes named after Gregory I (540-640) did well. Gregory was the first pope to come from a monastic background, to which he was supremely devoted. In the view of French-born Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509-1564), Gregory was the last good pope.

1. Pope Adeodatus I
2. Pope Adeodatus II
3. Pope Adrian III
4. Pope Agapetus I
5. Pope Agatho
6. Pope Alexander I
7. Pope Anacletus
8. Pope Anicetus
9. Pope Anastasius I
10. Pope Anterus
11. Pope Benedict II
12. Pope Boniface I
13. Pope Boniface IV
14. Pope Cause
15. Pope Callixtus I
16. Pope Celestine I
17. Pope Celestine V
18. Pope Clement I
19. Pope Cornelius
20. Pope Damasus I
21. Pope Dionysius
22. Pope Eleuterus
23. Pope Eugene I
24. Pope Eusebius
25. Pope Eutychian
26. Pope Evaristus
27. Pope Fabian
28. Pope Felix I
29. Pope Felix III
30. Pope Felix IV
31. Pope Gelasius I
32. Pope Gregory I
33. Pope Gregory II
34. Pope Gregory III
35. Pope Gregory VII
36. Pope Hilarius
37. Pope Hormisdas
38. Pope Hyginus
39. Pope Innocent I
40. Pope John I
41. Pope John XXIII
42. Pope John Paul II
43. Pope Julius I
44. Pope Leo I
45. Pope Leo II
46. Pope Leo III
47. Pope Leo IV
48. Pope Leo IX
49. Pope Linus
50. Pope Lucius I
51. Pope Marcellinus
52. Pope Marcellus I
53. Pope Mark
54. Pope Martin I
55. Pope Miltiades
56. Pope Nicholas I
57. Pope Paschal I
58. Pope Paul I
59. Pope Peter
60. Pope Pius I
61. Pope Pius V
62. Pope Pius X
63. Pope Pontian
64. Pope Sergius I
65. Pope Silverius
66. Pope Simplicius
67. Pope Siricius
68. Pope Sixtus I
69. Pope Sixtus II
70. Pope Sixtus III
71. Pope Soter
72. Pope Stephen I
73. Pope Stephen IV
74. Pope Sylvester I
75. Pope Symmachus
76. Pope Telesphorus
77. Pope Urban I
78. Pope Victor I
79. Pope Vitalian
80. Pope Zachary
81. Pope Zephyrinus
82. Pope Zosimus

Comment

I am always looking for a personal connection to events. In this case, it's my sister Olga. In her  memoirs she is photographed with Pope John Paul II at the Papal Nuncio's residence (page 125g) in May 1980 when the Pope visited Kenya for the first time.  A photo from this visit is shown at the top of this post. (She describes his visit on pp. 217-224.)

Pope John Paul II is the second person featured in her memoirs who has been canonized in her lifetime. The first was St. Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, who died in 1975 (pp. 185-189). He sent Olga to Kenya in 1960 (p. 54), just before the country became independent, when the "Mau-Mau" were calling for independence and many "Europeans" in Kenya were preparing to leave.

Olga was born in New York City in 1934. She will be 80 in November. She is a Kenyan citizen currently in Pamplona, Spain for specialized health care. Her mother (and, duh, mine), Mrs. E. R. Marlin (born in Holland, she wrote under her maiden name Hilda van Stockum), converted to Roman Catholicism in 1938, when she was in Washington, D.C. (her husband worked for FDR), following her friend Evie Hone. So Olga converted when she was four years old.

Olga spent her entire working life in Nairobi, more than half a century, creating institutions for the education of women in Kenya and other African countries. She was given an honorary doctorate in 2011 by Strathmore University in Nairobi.

(Update, Jan. 22, 2016: The Time Travel blog had 14,000 page views when I wrote it nearly two years ago. Now it has 57,000. Thank you for reading.)