By Rich Bockmann
A few weeks before Pope John Paul II was scheduled to be canonized as a saint in Rome, Maspeth’s faithful gathered over the weekend outside the neighborhood church the Polish pope visited in 1979 for a street co-naming ceremony honoring Blessed John Paul.
“How many saints walked the streets of Maspeth?” Jeff Gottlieb, co-chairman of the Polish-Jewish Dialogue Committee at Queens College, asked a crowd of about 200 people, who stood outside the Holy Cross Roman Catholic Church, on 56th Road, Sunday afternoon for the unveiling of Pope John Paul II Way. “How many potential saints prayed here?”
While the pope’s 1979 visit to the city may most widely be remembered for the mass he conducted before 75,000 at Yankee Stadium, in the Polish neighborhood of Maspeth the highlight of the occasion was his visit to Holy Cross Church.
Standing outside the rectory where the pope spent the night during his visit 35 years ago is a bronze statue the parish erected in his memory, and the Rev. Witold Mroziewski said Pope John Paul left “the great treasure of his signature in a small but now priceless guest book.”
The pope, born Karol Józef WojtyÅ‚a in the Polish town of Wadowice in 1929, is well-known for bringing Christian and Jewish Poles together after the Holocaust. He served as pope from 1978 until his death in 2005 and is said to have performed two posthumous miracles.
According to the church, his first was performed in June 2005 on a French nun afflicted with Parkinson’s disease and he performed his second miracle in 2011 on a Costa Rican woman with an aneurism. He was beatified in 2011 and is scheduled to be canonized in a modest ceremony in Rome April 27.
City Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley (D-Maspeth) sponsored the legislation to have the street name honoring Pope John Paul.
“The pope slept in this very building behind us, in the rectory when he visited in 1979,” she said. “He helped uplift Poland and countless Polish communities in New York, in America and around the world. Pope John Paul II, his work touched billions of lives, and now Queens residents for generations to come will be reminded of his legacy.”
Reach reporter Rich Bockmann by e-mail at rbockmann@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4574.
