06/10/2026
Several People asked me to reshare the story I told in my homily this past Sunday about Pope John Paul's visit to Baltimore in 1995, so I will recount it below.
On October 8, 1995, Pope John Paul II was finishing a visit to Baltimore. After a day filled with visits and meetings, he was supposed to go and visit St. Mary's seminary before going to BWI Airport to head back to Rome.
His itinerary was such that Pope John Paul was just supposed to meet the seminarians and other guests outside the seminary. No security provisions had been made for the Pope to go inside any of the buildings. But the Pope is the pope, so when the Pope changes his mind, the Pope gets what he wants.
At the last minute, Pope John Paul decided that he wanted to go inside to spend sometime in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament in the seminary chapel before departing for Rome. Since this wasn't part of the plan, when the Pope decided that he wanted to go inside, security teams sprang into action to make sure that the building was secure. SWAT teams, the bomb squad, and the military were called in to make sure that the seminary building was safe for the Pope.
Once the building was preliminarily secure, they brought in cadaver-sniffing dogs that are usually used to find bodies in earthquakes and feet of rubble when buildings collapse, to make sure that there were no people hiding in the building anywhere that the human officers couldn't find.
Immediately, the dogs started signally that the could sense a human presence in the building. This was starting and concerning to the security team. They followed the dogs to where they were tracking, and the dogs led to the chapel. This was of great concern to the security team, because this was the one place inside the building where the Holy Father wished to go.
The dogs and their handlers swept the chapel; no one was found. But the dogs kept alerting that someone was in the chapel. They despite the handlers trying to call the dogs off, they were persistent. They wouldn't relent. The dogs kept alerting and signally. The handlers followed the dogs through the chapel up into the Sanctuary and behind the altar where the dogs came to stopped and continued to alert, pointing and pawing, whimpering and pulling toward the Tabernacle of the chapel, signally to the handlers that within the Tabernacle, they sensed a human presence.
The handlers tried to call them off. They figured that the dogs must be triggered by something else. But the dogs would not relent.
On this Solemnity of Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of Jesus, in this true account of Pope John Paul II's October 1995 visit to St. Mary's, Baltimore, the dogs trained to sniff and search out human remains showed everyone present and remind us even today that which is the core belief of our Faith, that which separates us from every other Christian denomination (except for the Orthodox) and which so many Catholics don't believe but even dogs understood: that Jesus Christ, the same Jesus that lived and walked the earth 2000+ years ago, is Truly present, Body and Blood, True Flesh, in the Holy Eucharist, The Blessed Sacrament. Not symbolically, not figuratively, but Truly Present.
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"It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives..." - Pope John Paul II, August 19, 2000, World Youth Day Prayer Vigil
