At hospital chapel in Bangor, worshippers pray for late pope

BANGOR – As hundreds of thousands of pilgrims and hundreds of world leaders erupted into applause Friday morning in Vatican City after the funeral of Pope John Paul II, about 25 people prayed quietly inside the warmly lit chapel in St. Joseph Hospital on Broadway.

The local worshippers sat scattered in the chapel pews as doctors and nurses bustled through the hospital hallways sipping cups of coffee. At 6:30 a.m., the worshippers began reciting prayers reserved for the dead. “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice, let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications,” the worshippers recited.

The Felician sisters led the prayer service, four dressed in black habits and one dressed in white, sitting before a draped Communion table adorned with images of St. Peter’s Square and a photograph and ceramic figure of John Paul II.

Meanwhile, thousands of people stood in the square before the pontiff’s plain cypress coffin, shouting “Giovanni Paolo Santo” or “Saint John Paul,” as a call for the late pope to be canonized.

“We are losing a great man. It’s hard to see that after almost three decades,” Sister Mary Norberta, president of St. Joseph Hospital, said after Friday’s prayer service.

A memorial service for the pope was held Thursday at the hospital.

The pope’s death has added significance for one of the sisters, who twice met the pontiff while she was stationed in Rome. Sister Mary Edith first met John Paul in 1982.

“There was just this powerfulness. I couldn’t say a word. The tears were just coming,” Edith recalled in a telephone interview Friday. She was unable to attend the morning’s service.

A few years later, Edith asked her sister to knit a sweater for the pope to wear during his frequent skiing and outdoor trips.

“I said, ‘Why don’t you make a sweater for the Holy Father?'” Edith said. “She said, ‘Yeah, right.'”

Edith presented the pope with the white, cable-knit sweater in 1988 at his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, a hill town outside Rome. She never knew if the pontiff actually wore it. “He walked right up to me and said, ‘What have we got here?'” she said. “If he gave it away, that’s John Paul.”

During that second meeting, her speech came more easily, the sister said.

“The words were finally about to come out,” she said.

Photos of both visits hang in a display box on the hospital’s second floor.

“Losing him, the world has lost a real treasure,” Edith said. “He embraced all religions.” Though the other six nuns never met him, the pope held a special place in the hearts of all seven of the hospital’s Felician sisters.

The order of the Sisters of St. Felix originated in 1855 in Warsaw, Poland, the pontiff’s native country.

“Our community was founded in Poland,” Norberta said, adding that the order previously required that its nuns be of Polish descent, a requirement that was dropped in the 1940s.

In Poland, 800,000 people gathered in a field in Krakow to watch the service, many having spent the previous night attending Mass and gathering around bonfires.

Inside the hospital chapel, one couple who remained kneeled in prayer for several minutes after the service as the smoky smell of incense lingered in the air. The others dipped their fingers in holy water as they filed out.

Though the Mass after the prayer service had concluded, Norberta said, she took comfort in the fact that services would continue around the world Friday as worshippers in every time zone awoke.

“The Masses will be said all day long,” she said.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SISTER MARY EDITH

During a 1988 visit to the pope’s summer home at Castel Gandolfo outside Rome, Sister Mary Edith of Bangor, a Felician nun, shakes hands with Pope John Paul II just before she hands him a sweater knitted by her sister.