(Continued from page 20)

• The Rev. Thomas Reese, a Vatican analyst, said the decision to canonize both popes was a "brilliant move to unify the church," given that each pope has his own admirers and critics.
• "With the joint announcement, Pope Francis is saying we do not have to choose between popes, we can honor and revere both as holy men who served the church well in their times," he wrote on his blog for the National Catholic Reporter newspaper.
• Vatican II, which John XXIII opened a year before his 1963 death, opened the church to people of other faiths and allowed for Mass to be celebrated in the languages of the faithful, rather than Latin. In the years since it closed in 1965, though, it has become a source of division in the church, with critics blaming a faulty interpretation of Vatican II's true meaning on the fall in priestly vocations and the "crisis" in the church today.
• To anyone who has been paying attention, Francis' decision to canonize John Paul and John XXIII should come as no surprise: The Jesuit was made a cardinal by John Paul, who attended Vatican II, and is very much a priest of John's legacy.
• On the anniversary of John Paul's death this year, Francis prayed at the tombs of both John Paul and John XXIII -- an indication that he sees a great personal and spiritual continuity in them.
• "Two different popes, very important to the church, will be announced saint together - it's a beautiful gesture," said the Rev. Jozef Kloch, spokesman for Poland's Catholic bishops, who like most Poles was overjoyed by the news of John Paul's impending canonization but impatient to know the date.
• Francis will set the date at an upcoming meeting of cardinals.
• The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, confirmed that the miracle that brought John Paul to the ranks of saints concerned a Costa Rican woman, Floribeth Mora, who on Friday broke months of silence to tell her story in public, surrounded by her family, doctors and church officials at a news conference in the archbishop's residence in San Jose, Costa Rica.
• A tearful Mora described how she awoke at her home in Dulce Nombre de Tres Rios, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the capital, on April 8, 2011 with a debilitating headache that sent her to the hospital. She was diagnosed with having suffered a cerebral aneurism in the right side of her brain.
• Doctors decided they couldn't operate because the area was inaccessible.
• "With an open operation or an endovascular intervention, the risk to Floribeth would have been to die or be left with a significant neurological deficit," her doctor, Dr. Alejandro Vargas, told reporters.
• She was sent home with painkillers.

(Continued on page 22)