A vial holding a drop of the blood of the beatified Pope John Paul II has been placed in the altar of a Church in Krakow, Poland.
Pope John Paul II, polish-born, was beatified by the Catholic Church, on May 1, by Pope Benedict XVI.
The late Pope took a step towards sainthood when he was beatified in a
ceremony which drew a crowd of about 1.5 million people.
After his
beatification, Pope John Paul began to be addressed as "blessed" and his
feast day was fixed at October 22.
According to the Polish news agency PAP, therelic of a drop of the blood of Pope John Paul was placed in the Sanctuary of the Blessed John Paul II
in Krakow.
His early career had been in his native Poland where, in the
city of Krakow, he rose from a parish priest into an archbishop.
Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz of Krakow said, in a mass, that the
blood relic commemorated the self-sacrifice of the Pope John Paul when
he shot at by a Turkish gunman in 1981.
The practice of venerating relics of the dead
is very old in the Catholic Church and by the third century A.D., a
thriving industry in relics of dead saints had risen into prominence in
the Christian Roman Empire and lasted deep into the Middle Ages.