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 in the South.

In her 1992 autobiography, "Rosa Parks: My Story," she said many believe she did not give up her seat because she was tired from working, but that was not true.

"I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day," Parks wrote. "I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the tired I was, was tired of giving in."

Born Rosa Louise McCauley on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala., she twice quit school to care for ailing relatives but eventually earned her high school diploma in 1933, a year after marrying barber Raymond Parks. He died in 1977.

After her arrest and payment of a $14 fine, Parks lost her job as a seamstress at a Montgomery department store. Her husband quit his job after his employer banned any talk of Rosa Parks' case in the workplace. The family moved in 1957 to Detroit. Parks worked there as a seamstress and then, from 1965 to 1988, she worked as a staff assistant to U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. She retired in 1988.

In a 1993 interview with Catholic News Service, Parks cited two Detroit Catholics --- Father William Cunningham, co-founder of Focus: Hope, and Auxiliary Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton --- as among those carrying on the civil rights struggle for a new generation.

"These are two outstanding (Catholic) people that I know of," she said. Sadly, she added, "there was none in Alabama" at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott.

---CNS