Is this Pope John Paul II waving from beyond the grave? Vatican TV director says yes

Is this Pope John Paul II waving from beyond the grave? Vatican TV director says yes

Mangalore Today News Network

January 15: This fiery figure is being hailed as Pope John Paul II making an appearance beyond the grave.

The image, said by believers to show the Holy Father with his right hand raised in blessing, was spotted during a ceremony in Poland to mark the second anniversary of his death.

 

 

 

Details appeared on the Vatican News Service, a TV station in Rome which specialises in religious news broadcasts.

Burned into the memory: The image that appeared in the bonfire, Tending his flock: Pope John Paul II at an audience in 2001 (right)

Service director Jarek Cielecki, a Polish priest and close friend of John Paul II, travelled to Poland after hearing an onlooker had photographed the image.

Father Cielecki said he was convinced the picture showed the former pontiff.

"You can see the image of a person in the flames and I think it is the servant of God, Pope John Paul II," he said.

The pictures were being broadcast continuously on Italian TV and also posted on religious websites, some of which crashed as thousands logged on to see for themselves the eerie figure formed by the flames.

The bonfire was lit during a service at Beskid Zywiecki, close to John Paul’s birthplace at Katowice, southern Poland, on April 2 - the second anniversary of his death.

Hundreds had attended the ceremony. Gregorz Lukasik, the Polish man who took the photographs, said: "It was only afterwards when I got home and looked at the pictures that I realised I had something.

"I showed them to my brother and sister and they, like me, were convinced the flames had formed the image of Pope John Paul II.

"I was so happy with the picture that I showed it to our local bishop who said that Pope John Paul had made many pilgrimages during his life and he was still making them in death."

 

The Vatican is currently studying evidence of a second miracle attributed to Pope John Paul II who died in April 2005. He was beatified in 2007 (only the second person after Mother Theresa for whom the usual delay of five years after death was waived) after being recognised by the Catholic Church as having miraculously cured a French nun bedridden by Parkinson’s disease after she prayed to him.

 

The second miracle being evidenced came to light after Gerardo Pierro, the Archbishop of Salerno in southern Italy, said an unnamed man in his diocese had been miraculously cured of lung cancer after the late Pope appeared to his wife in a dream. The man?s condition was found to have improved rapidly in the days following his wife’s dream, baffling doctors monitoring him. If this miracle is made ’official’ by the current Pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI, his predecessor will be well on his way to canonisation.