"Silent Witness to a Life of Devotion" (South China Morning Post, May-2-2011)
It was May 4, 1984, and Pope, John Paul II was visiting Sorok Island off South Korea, a former leper colony where several hundred people with the disfiguring disease were receiving care.
Arturo Mari was there, as he was on all the pontiff's trips, a silent witness to almost every papal audience, mass, vocation and dinner party.
As the pope's personal photographer, Mari had nearly unrestricted access to John Paul's 27 year papacy, and his verdict as the pontiff's beatification approaches is unwavering: he was a living saint.
The protocol that day in 1984 called for John Paul to enter the pavilion where the patients were gathered, give a brief speech on the meaning of suffering, then leave. But after surveying the scene, John Paul brushed aside a cardinal who tried to speed him along and set to work.
"He touched them with his hands, caressed them, kissed each one," Mari, 71, recalled. "Eight hundred lepers, one by one, one by one!"
"I can guarantee you he was a living saint, because everything I could see with my eyes, hear with my ears, you cannot believe that this man could do so much."
