{"id":4926,"date":"2006-10-30T09:51:01","date_gmt":"2006-10-30T09:51:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/honoring-john-paul-ii.html"},"modified":"2006-10-30T09:51:01","modified_gmt":"2006-10-30T09:51:01","slug":"honoring-john-paul-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/honoring-john-paul-ii.html","title":{"rendered":"Honoring John Paul II"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new statue in Toledo<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

The area Polish community celebrated a national hero Sunday, dedicating a statue at Saint Adalbert parish<\/a> honoring the late Pope John Paul II. <\/p>\n

Hundreds showed up for the event, that displayed hometown pride to one of Poland’s native sons. <\/p>\n

It’s a larger-than-life statue of a larger-than-life man. The late Pope John Paul II, immortalized in bronze at the foot of Saint Adalbert parrish. <\/p>\n

snip<\/em><\/p>\n

The artist who created the statue knows that message well. Michal Batkiewecz was born in a communist Poland. <\/p>\n

"(I) believe that John Paul II was instrumental in overturning the communist regime in Poland. Thanks to John Paul II, he can live in a free country, just like America," he says. <\/p>\n

The artist has done more than fifteen statues of John Paul II around the world, his largest is more than thirty feet tall. But this is his first in the United States. The parish financed the $60,000 statue through the sale of personalized paver stones. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new statue in Toledo The area Polish community celebrated a national hero Sunday, dedicating a statue at Saint Adalbert parish honoring the late Pope John Paul II. Hundreds showed up for the event, that displayed hometown pride to one of Poland’s native sons. It’s a larger-than-life statue of a larger-than-life man. The late Pope…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nHonoring John Paul II - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/honoring-john-paul-ii.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Honoring John Paul II - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A new statue in Toledo The area Polish community celebrated a national hero Sunday, dedicating a statue at Saint Adalbert parish honoring the late Pope John Paul II. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}