Monday, November 1, All Saints Day, an aircraft of the LOT Polish airlines, a Boeing 767 from Newark in the U.S., managed to land at Okęcie airport in Warsaw without a cart.
More than 230 passengers and eleven members of the crew came out unscathed from this highly risky operation, which took place in Poland for the first time.
Merit was immediately attributed to Commander Tadeusz Wrona, a pilot with fifteen thousand flight hours, many of which at the helm of similar aircraft. Not even twenty-four hours after this happy event, however, talk of a miracle was going around.
Father Piotr Chyła, a Redemptorist who was returning home from America was on board that plane. The priest was carrying with him the remains of John Paul II, but he never wanted to specify exactly what remains they were.
Despite his repeated statements he did not want to attribute the salvation to the blessed Pope, the media and internet now do not talk about anything else.
On the occasion of the liturgical memorial of the Blessed John Paul II, celebrated for the first time last October 22, the agency KAI of the Polish episcopate calculated that there are seventy among churches and chapels that possess his relics.
Apart from the mortal remains, buried in the basilica of St. Peter, undivided as was thought at first (the bishop Tadeusz Pieronek recklessly announced in April 2008 the arrival of the Polish Pope's heart, to be placed in the cathedral of the castle Wawel in Krakow), this is blood and hair, which being part of his body, are considered first class, while objects once used by the Blessed, such as robes, miter and pastoral belong to the second.
As emphasized by the KAI, the relics of blood and hair of the blessed are dispensed by his two former Secretaries: Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, archbishop of Krakow, and Monsignor Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki, Latin archbishop of Lviv in Ukraine.
According to a release from the Vatican press office issued on April 26 this year, just days before the beatification of the Polish pope, “during the last days of the illness of the Holy Father, the medical staff performed blood tests, to be made available at the Blood Transfusion Centre of the Bambino Gesu Hospital in view of a possible transfusion ... However, the transfusion did not take place and the blood collected was stored in four small containers. Two of these were available to the private secretary of Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Dziwisz; the other two remained at the Bambino Gesu Hospital”.
In Poland the date this blood was collected is given as - April 2, 2005, but word has it that there was another collection done at the Gemelli hospital “before the tracheotomy”, that is, in February of that year (but some say that it was collected after the intervention).