All We Have to Do is Open Our Eyes Quiz

Answer: John Paul II

Karol Józef Wojtyla was born in Poland in 1920. He became Pope John Paul II in 1978, and held that office until his death in 2005. He was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011, and made a saint, or canonised, by Pope Francis in 2014, as Pope Saint John Paul II.

In order for a person to be canonised, it must be proved to a panel of medical experts and theologians that there are at least two miracles that can be definitively attributed to them. In the case of John Paul II, there were two miracles of healing.

A French nun, Sister Marie Pierre, had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2001. She was aware that the Pope had also been diagnosed with Parkinson's, and was so upset that she stopped watching him on television. Two months after the Pope's death, she prayed to him. When she woke the next day, she was better. This miracle was part of the justification for John Paul II's beatification, the first step towards canonisation.

The second miracle attributed to Pope John Paul II concerned a Costa Rican woman, Floribeth Mora Diaz. Told she had just weeks to live due to a brain aneurysm, she started praying to John Paul II. After watching his beatification ceremony she went to sleep. She awoke, hearing the voice of the Pope telling her to get up. She felt better and doctors found no trace of the aneurysm.

The photograph is of the flag of Poland.

Answer: Mormonism

The Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons, commemorate the Miracle of the Gulls with a monument in front of the Salt Lake Assembly Hall, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The monument features a column topped by two bronze seagulls, sculpted by Mahonri Young.

In 1848, the Mormon pioneers in Utah were troubled by a plague of insects, which threatened to destroy their crops. They believed these insects to be crickets, but they were in fact a type of katydid, now known as Mormon crickets. They are flightless, but swarm in great numbers and are highly destructive, eating all vegetation they come across. The settlers were unable to stop the insects from their ravages. They were rescued by a huge flock of seagulls that came from the Great Salt Lake on June 9, 1848, and consumed the swarm of insects, thus saving their crops.

The settlers had experienced an earlier miracle in 1846, when a large number of quails had appeared on their trek to the Great Salt Lake when food supplies were low.

The picture is of the gulls from the monument.

Answer: Islam

Hazrat Babayan died in September 1931, but her birth date is unknown. Estimates vary between 1790 and 1820. She was born to a noble Pashtun family in Afghanistan. She was educated in many languages and memorised the Qu'ran. She ran away from an arranged marriage and was trained by Hindu gurus and Sufi saints. Hazrat Babayan travelled widely, and is said to have visited Mecca disguised as a man. She cared for the poor and pilgrims who needed help at Mecca.

Babayan came to Pune in India in 1905, and stayed there the rest of her life, living under a tree. She disdained possessions and lived in simple conditions. There are stories of her enabling robbers to steal bracelets and a shawl from her because she saw no value in them. Some miracles attributed to her include surviving being buried alive, restoring sight to a blind child, curing fevers and finding lost animals.

The photo shows the Kaaba at Mecca.

Answer: Faith healing

Aimee Semple McPherson was a rival with Billy Sunday as the most influential evangelical preacher of her day. She started her Foursquare Ministry in the 1920s through pioneering radio broadcasts. McPherson was a staunch opponent of the theory of evolution, supporting the prosecution at the 1925 Scopes trial. She was liberal on other matters, working tirelessly on charity drives, ensuring her gatherings were mixed race, and supporting the reforms of Franklin D. Roosevelt. She was against fascism and communism, and in favour of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

McPherson carried out faith healing events that were attended by thousands. Newspapers testified to the effects of her works. In one event, in 1921, attended by 30,000, a woman who had been paralysed from the waist down since childhood rose from her wheelchair and walked. Hundreds of other healings at that event included lame people abandoning their crutches, a diminution of a goitre and the return of an abscessed arm to normality. A survey of the attendees at an event found a large number who said they had been healed or improved.

The photograph shows an advert for some mineral water that was supposedly capable of healing afflictions.

Answer: Ireland

Knock is a village in County Mayo, Ireland. On 21 August 1879, at 8PM, a woman from the village, Mary Byrne, claimed she saw three figures in the gable of the local church. She fetched family and friends, and a group of them observed Mary, the Mother of Jesus, St Joseph, her husband, and St John the Evangelist. There was an altar, a lamb, a cross, angels, and a glowing light. The numbers viewing this vision at any time varied between two and maybe 25, with ages ranging from five to 75, and it was observed for a total of two hours.

The vision was investigated by a Roman Catholic Church Commission of Enquiry, which concluded that the testimony of the witnesses was trustworthy and that a miracle had occurred at Knock. A shrine was built at the village and Knock became a place of pilgrimage, visited by Pope John Paul II in 1979.

The picture shows the island of Ireland.

Answer: Ganesha

On 21 September 1995, what became known as the Ganesha drinking milk miracle occurred. Ganesha is a Hindu deity identified by having an elephant head. A statue of the deity was observed in a temple in New Delhi to drink up an offering of milk through its trunk. The word spread, and Hindus in Nepal, United Arab Emirates, Canada, and the United Kingdom were among those who reported the same phenomenon at their temples.

The photograph shows a wooden carving of Ganesha.

Answer: Egypt

Saint Abram was born Boulos Gabriel, in the Egyptian city of Mallawi, in 1829. His mother died when he was young, and he went into the Coptic Orthodox Church as a teenager, becoming a monk at the age of 19. He became Bishop Abram in 1881, serving the parish of Fayoum and Giza, the second largest city on Egypt.

Bishop Abram is credited with many miracles. During a cholera epidemic in 1896, he wrote on and blessed 200 sheets of paper, which he gave to his followers to hang on their doors. This was said to have prevented any of their families from succumbing to cholera. In 1912, a woman suffering from crippling rheumatoid arthritis which prevented her walking, and her husband, afflicted by severe headaches, came to him. Their symptoms disappeared after he prayed for them. The woman was able to walk away. The bishop was asked to adjudicate in the matter of a valuable gun that was missing and allegedly hidden by one of three brothers. He said that the one who had taken the gun would die by the gun. The brother with the gun subsequently had an argument with his wife, tried to shoot her with the gun, and it backfired, killing him.

Bishop Abram died in 1914. Over 20,000 attended his funeral, Christians and Muslims. He was buried in a grave he had prepared himself. He was canonised in 1964.

Answer: speaking in tongues

Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, is performed by, among other groups, certain Charismatic Christian and Pentecostal Christian movements. They point to examples from the New Testament of the Bible, where passages from books such as Mark and the Acts of the Apostles refer to the practice. People speaking in tongues speak as if in a trance, in a language they may have no conscious knowledge or experience of. The belief is that speaking in tongues is evidence that one has been baptised with the holy spirit, or it is a spiritual gift that might give a message, perhaps to unbelievers, or a direction to Christians.

Hopefully the picture of a tabby with its tongue out helped.

Answer: Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, in what is now North Macedonia, in 1910. She left home at 18 to become a nun, arriving in India in 1929. She worked as a missionary and teacher until 1946, when she had a calling to care for the poor. She started her work with the poor in 1948, in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Her congregation was called Missionaries of Charity. She set up a hospice for people to die with dignity. By 1997 she had a group of 4,000 sisters managing hospices, orphanages and centres providing relief from disabilities, illness, or disaster, worldwide. She also had over 5,000 Missionaries of Charity worldwide. Her work was recognised by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

After Mother Teresa died in 1997, there was some eagerness for her to be beatified and canonised. The 1998 miracle of curing Monica Besra, from India, near to Calcutta, of a tumour was recognised, and contributed to her beatification in 2003. A second miracle, when a Brazilian man was cured of multiple brain tumours in 2008 after he sought her intervention, was approved by Pope Francis in 2015, and Mother Teresa was proclaimed Saint Teresa of Calcutta in 2016.

The picture shows a map of Kolkata.

Answer: 14th Dalai Lama

The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was spiritual leader of the Tibetan people and the former head of state. He was born in 1935, named Lhamo Thondup. Following the death of the 13th Dalai Lama in 1935, a search was started in 1936 for suitable boys that may be the new incarnation of the Dalai Lama, with the intention that the successor would be selected by drawing lots using a Golden Urn.

The head of the embalmed body of the 13th Dalai Lama, that had pointed towards the southeast, was found to have moved towards the northeast. The regent had a vision that suggested the area to search, north, near the border with China, and also featured a large monastery with golden roof and turquoise tiles. A Lama identified three unusual children in the area. Two were eliminated, but the third, a "fearless child", was from a village overlooking a monastery with a gilded and turquoise roof.

A party visited the boy's house. A Lama pretended to be a servant and sat in the kitchen. The two-year-old boy saw some prayer beads he was holding and asked for them. The boy identified him as a Lama and addressed him in an accent from the faraway capital, Lhasa, with a dialect incomprehensible to his mother. The prayer beads had belonged to the 13th Dalai Lama. Further tests involved the child choosing between objects that had or hadn't belonged to the 13th Dalai Lama, He was invariably right. Ultimately, the decision was made for Lhamo Thondup to be declared the 14th Dalai Lama without recourse to the Golden Urn lottery.

Given the spiritual name Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama's period in office started in February 1940.

The picture shows China, with Tibet in red.