Rosa Parks, hailed as 'prophet' of equality, justice, dead at 92

Published: 2005-10-25

DETROIT (CNS) -- Rosa Parks, the civil rights pioneer who died Oct. 24 at the age of 92, "changed the history of our nation" and "forced us to recognize the dignity of every person," said Cardinal Adam J. Maida of Detroit. "She was a prophet -- a common instrument of God inviting us and challenging us to a new vision of solidarity, equality and justice," the cardinal said of Parks, who prompted a more-than-yearlong bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., after her arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. Parks, a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church for her entire life and a resident of Detroit since 1957, attended an interfaith prayer service in St. Louis led by Pope John Paul II at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis in 1999. She met the pope privately afterward, rising from her wheelchair to shake the pope's hand. But it was "in her own simple way," as Cardinal Maida put it, that Parks sparked the boycott that led to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1956 order integrating Montgomery buses and gave impetus to the civil rights movement.

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