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Vacationing priest handed out communion at papal funeral Rev. David Berberian paid $500 for an airline ticket to Rome more than a year ago, when he planned a vacation for the second week of April 2005. The pastor of St. Thomas the Apostle parish in Delmar told The Evangelist that the airline would have given him $2,000 to turn in his ticket so they could accommodate mourners seeking flights to attend the April 8 funeral of Pope John Paul II. Father Berberian, who also serves on the diocesan Marriage Tribunal, thought about canceling his vacation. Then a friend who works at the North American College in Rome offered him the opportunity to distribute communion at the pontiff's funeral. Crowds of Rome "Once you get there, you get caught up in the whole thing," he said of the event, attended by thousands of clergy in addition to a crowd of hundreds of thousands that filled St. Peter's Square and overflowed throughout Rome to watch the funeral on giant TV screens set up at several sites. On the day of the funeral, security at St. Peter's Square was tight; airspace for a five-mile radius around Rome had even been closed to all but authorized planes. Father Berberian managed to bypass all but two security checkpoints by riding to the event with Bishop William Skylstad of Spokane, Washington, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. When security guards saw the blue car in which the clergymen were riding, he said, they often just waved them through. Communion Father Berberian estimated that he was one of about 400 priests who gave out communion at the funeral. "It was very organized, much more than I thought it would be," he told The Evangelist. "They had everything lined up." He was given approximately 200 hosts to distribute and did so within 15 or 20 minutes. "Once they were gone, they were gone," he added, noting that many of the 300,000 pilgrims in St. Peter's Square probably did not get to receive the Eucharist. Emotions Being part of such a massive crowd did not lessen the emotional impact of participating in the funeral of Pope John Paul. At the end of the Mass, when 12 laymen carried the Pope's casket into St. Peter's Basilica and turned it to face the crowd, Father Berberian felt that the pontiff was "saying goodbye for the last time. It was quite touching." He was also moved by the funeral's ecumenical aspects, particularly when bishops of the Eastern Catholic churches offered final prayers for the Pope and Orthodox clergy were among those processing to Pope John Paul's tomb. (4/28/05) |