Sanctuary of Saint John Paul II

Image: Wikimedia Commons

On the White Seas of Kraków, the chalky wasteland of the old Solvay soda works where young Karol Wojtyła labored in wooden clogs during the Nazi occupation, his city built him a sanctuary. Above the entrance stand the two Latin sentences of October 22, 1978, the day his pontificate began, whose anniversary the Church keeps as his feast today: Be not afraid, and Open wide the doors for Christ. Erected in 2011 and consecrated in 2016 on the anniversary of his election, the church glows inside with golden mosaics. In the octagonal lower Church of the Relics, an ampoule of his blood, drawn in his final days, rests inside the marble altar beside the original slab from his Vatican tomb; upstairs, in a glass case, hangs the white cassock he wore on May 13, 1981, still marked with the blood of the assassination attempt in Saint Peter's Square. Around the altar open chapels of the Marian shrines he loved, one carved entirely of Wieliczka salt, and a short walk away Saint Faustina rests at the Divine Mercy shrine: two neighbors in Łagiewniki, apostles of mercy to the whole world.