Museum focuses on rituals of Vatican
lic population in Houston,” museum president Genevieve Keeney said, “but our exhibit was created as an educational experience for everybody. It’s a place where they can have a glimpse of the Vatican, learn more about the popes and how we honor them.”
The show, which opened in June, is an outgrowth of cooperation with the Vatican that led to the larger exhibit’s opening in 2008.
George Sheltz, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, said the exhibit “offers a unique visual and informative tour of the customary practices involved with the election and burial of a pope.”
While the museum’s traditional mortuary exhibits run to hearses, unusual coffins and examples of 19th-century mourning jewelry, the pope exhibit was propelled by museum CEO Robert Boetticher’s fascination with the rituals surrounding John Paul’s death.
“Here was about 2,000 years of ritual,” he said, “and it was still going on.”
Boetticher, former CEO of the Houston-based mortuary giant Service Corp International and embalmer of Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, immediately recognized the educational potential of a popethemed exhibit and sketched rudimentary plans on an airplane napkin.
Penetrating Vatican bureaucracy was a slow process, but once the right Roman ears heard the plan, enthusiasm grew. Boetticher’s initial plan, utilizing a mere 10-by-10-foot space, grew exponentially.
Using Vatican specifications, a replica papal throne was installed. Swiss Guard uniforms and the sober attire of John Paul’s pall bearers were fitted onto mannequins. Audio news reports documenting the papal funeral were piped into the exhibit hall.
As with the new saint exhibit, much of the larger presentation focuses on John Paul, the first non-Italian pope in 500 years.
Born in 1920, John Paul spent most of his church career in Poland, where he was ordained as a priest in 1946. He was fluent in 12 languages, and, as leader of the church, traveled to more than 120 countries.
He reached out to non-Catholics, envisioning the Roman church as uniting with Jews, Muslims and other Christians in a “great religious armada.”
Candidates for canonization must be associated with two miracles, verified by church bodies, to achieve sainthood.
John Paul’s first miracle was the 2006 healing of a French nun, sister Marie Simon-Pierre, who was confined to her bed by Parkinson’s disease. After her colleagues prayed for the dead pope’s intercession, SimonPierre was cured and able to return to work.
“I was sick and now I am cured,” she told a news reporter. The Vatican authenticated the miracle and John Paul was beatified, a preliminary step to sainthood, in May 2011.
Shortly after the late pope’s beatification, a second miracle, involving a woman with a potentially fatal brain aneurysm, was reported in Costa Rica. It, too, was verified. On July 4, 2013, Pope Francis announced that he had approved the pope’s advancement to sainthood.
Pope John XXIII, credited with healing a seriously ill woman, was among more than 1,300 people beatified by John Paul II. That critical event occurred in 2000.
Thirteen years later, Pope Francis marked the 50th anniversary of John’s death by pray- ing at his grave. Weeks later, he announced that the late pontiff would be canonized, despite the fact that a second miracle had not been verified.
Both former church leaders were promoted to sainthood on Divine Mercy Sunday.
St. John Paul II’s feast day is Oct. 22; St. John XXIII’s, Oct. 11.