Within Reach
Monday morning, I went to Mass with a saint.
Or, more precisely, a very small part of one.
Earlier this week, a first-class pilgrim relic of St. John Paul II traveled through my diocese. It contains a small vial of his blood, drawn during his final illness in 2005, and is mounted inside an elaborate reliquary fashioned to resemble an open book.
It is one of four relics containing his blood and the only one designated as a pilgrim, or traveling, relic.
Of course, I was excited to see it.
Mass came first. Afterward, veneration.
Pope John Paul II was the first pope I remember. He seemed young and active and joyful.
I loved watching people hand their babies to him with complete trust.
Just hand over the little human.
It fascinated me.
Maybe that’s what made him feel accessible to me, even as a girl who really didn’t understand his role.
He seemed reachable.
Then, on May 13, 1981, someone tried to assassinate him.
I was a teenager.
I remember hearing the news and thinking something that seems terribly naive now:
Why would someone try to kill the pope?
I was confused and distraught.
And I remember something changing.
For me, the assassination attempt did something to the papacy that September 11 would do to air travel twenty years later.
There was a clear before and after.
That afternoon in St. Peter’s Square, parents lifted their children toward John Paul II over the barriers, and he reached back.
In my research, I learned that shortly before the shots were fired, he took an 18-month-old girl named Sarah Bartoli into his arms and kissed her. The man who intended to kill him later said he delayed firing because the pope was holding the child.
John Paul II handed little Sarah back to her parents.
Then, the shots were fired.
Afterward, papal security changed. Armored popemobiles appeared, eventually surrounding him with the transparent bulletproof enclosure I remember so clearly.
We could still see him.
But mamas couldn’t reach him with their babies the way they had before.
He didn’t retreat from the world, of course. Pope John Paul II continued traveling for nearly another twenty-four years.
As a teenager watching from Louisiana, I understood why the barriers had to be put in place, but I didn’t like how it felt.
Monday, forty-five years later, I found myself standing in a church waiting to get close to him.
What strikes me now is what I didn’t see.
Phones.
I don’t remember people taking pictures or recording videos. For those few moments, no one seemed concerned with documenting the experience. We were simply waiting our turn to be close to his relic.
When my turn came, I handed the attendant two rosaries, a bracelet with an image of Mother Mary, and a necklace with a crucifix and the Miraculous Medal that I wear daily. He quickly touched each of them to the reliquary.
I was very aware of the people behind me and didn’t want to linger or take more than a moment. But before he could hand my things back to me, I reached out with my left hand and placed it on the glass dome covering the blood.
I wish I could tell you I prayed.
I wish I had whispered thank you for your exemplary life.
I didn’t.
I didn’t have a plan.
For maybe two seconds, I simply stood there with my hand against the glass.
Still.
Present.
Then I took my things and moved away.
I sat in a nearby pew and put everything back into the little pouches I had brought with me.
Tears welled in my eyes. I was affected in a way I hadn’t expected.
I sat there trying to regain my composure and understand why.
Maybe it was because this wasn’t a saint I had first encountered in a book or through stories handed down by the Church.
I remembered him.
I remembered the man before he became St. John Paul II, before I understood what my own Catholic faith meant to me.
I remembered his accessibility.
And I remembered the bullets.
Four days after the assassination attempt, Pope John Paul II spoke from his hospital bed and asked the faithful to pray for the man who had shot him. He said that he had sincerely forgiven him.
My teenage self thought that was the most bizarre thing I’d ever heard.
Two years later, Pope John Paul II went to the prison where Mehmet Ali Ağca was being held. He entered his cell, sat beside the man who had tried to kill him, and forgave him.
I didn’t think I could ever do that. Feel that. Forgiveness? For someone who tried to kill me?
He was built different.
That’s a life well-lived.
A life worth venerating.
He was still a man. He had a body. He had blood. He could be wounded. He could suffer.
And he could forgive.
The blood isn’t the miracle.
His life is the testimony.
I stumbled across something else in my research.
Earlier that very day, Pope John Paul II had lunch with Jérôme Lejeune and Lejeune’s wife. Lejeune was part of the French research team that identified the chromosomal cause of Down syndrome, an extra copy of chromosome 21.
My oldest son, Ty, has Down syndrome.
Of all the details I expected to uncover while researching a day I remembered from my childhood, that certainly wasn’t one of them.
That fact felt like a little wink.
Maybe coincidences ARE just God’s way of remaining anonymous.
When I finally left the church, I felt incredibly fortunate to have been there.
So grateful.
But I felt something else, too.
I wanted to be better.
Kinder. More forgiving. More faithful. More worthy of the life I’ve been given.
That’s quite a lot for a four-second encounter, right?
But perhaps that’s the point of venerating the life of a saint.
You don’t walk away wanting to worship them.
You walk away wanting to live more like them.
Sure, I have a long way to go.
A very long way!
But I’m trying.
Forty-five years after I watched a barrier go up between that pope and the people who wanted to reach him, I reached out my hand.
There was still glass between us.
But in that moment, the barrier disappeared.
On Monday, September 21, 2026, I spent a few precious moments with a saint.
His carefully preserved blood isn’t the miracle.
His life is the testimony.
And what a life it was.
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