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☆ The oOU Diocese of Savannah j£_ ☆ hern Cross *ldhrf% 5850 «■» 3000 Vol. 80, No. 18 $.50 PER ISSUE Thursday, May 4, 2000 Contents Headline Hopscotch 2 News ! 3 Commentary 4-5 Around the Diocese 6 DCCW Convention 7 Faith Alive! 8-9 Notices .... 10-11 Last But Not Least 12 Pope canonizes Polish nun as first saint of new millennium By Benedicta Cipolla Vatican City (CNS) ope John Paul II declared fellow Pole Faustina Kowalska the first saint of the new millennium, calling her “a gift of God for our time.” At a canonization Mass April 30 in Saint Peter’s Square, the pope said the humble life of the Polish Mercy sister, who died in 1938 at the age of 33 and whose diary account of visions and revelations inspired Divine Mercy devotion worldwide, “is tied to the history of the 20th cen tury.” The period in which Christ entrust ed his message of Divine Mercy to Left: A depiction of Saint Faustina Kowalska and Jesus, who entrusted his message of Divine Mercy to the Polish nun, hangs at the canonization Mass for Saint Faustina April 30 at the Vatican. Saint Faustina, in the years between World War I and World War II, is of great significance, said the pope. “Those who remember, who were witnesses and participants in the events of those years and the horrible suffering of millions of people, know how necessary the message of mercy was,” he said. As archbishop of Krakow, the pope took a personal interest in Sister Faustina, helping to retract a Vatican ban on her diary by demonstrating that it had been based on misleading translations of the nun’s revelatory writings. The ban was lifted in 1978, six months before the current pope’s election. Bom Helen Kowalska to a poor peasant family in central Poland, Saint Faustina entered the Warsaw convent of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in 1925. (Continued on page 11) DCCW Convention held in Savannah The Diocesan Council of Catholic Women held its annual convention at Saint James Parish, Savannah, April 28-30. Left: Father John J. Lyons, pastor of Saint Joseph Parish, Augusta, greets his mother, Jane. Right: past S.D.C.C.W. presidents Joan Schaaf (Savannah), Convention General Chairman, Marci Arling (Statesboro) and Lucile Usery (Albany), Atlanta Province Director, prepare to greet partici pants. For more photos, see page 7.