Posted on 04/10/2007 4:41:32 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
What are the criteria for sainthood? Who decides you can be one? Should the late Pope be fast-tracked to sainthood? Paul Vallely asks the Big Question
Surely he hasn't been dead long enough?
In the old days, you had to wait a long time before they made you a saint. It was 500 years before they canonised Joan of Arc. But at the funeral of Pope John Paul II chants of santo subito - sainthood now - erupted. Two months later, his successor Benedict XVI announced he would waive the "wait at least five years" rule in John Paul II's case.
Yesterday, on the second anniversary of the Polish pope's death, the findings of investigations at diocesan level in Krakow and Rome have been passed to the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of the Saints. If a panel of theologians and a group of cardinals and bishops give their approval, the case will then be sent to the Pope who could have his predecessor beatified - a halfway house to sainthood.
So what is a saint?
All times and religions, apart, perhaps, from Confucianism, have had their saints - exceptionally holy individuals who were felt to be close to God. The Jews had the tzadik, the righteous ones, who included the Macabees and the Prophets, to whom 50 sanctuaries have been discovered from ancient times. Hindus have the paramahamsa, which in Sanskrit translates as "supreme swan". Buddhists have the arhats, who have achieved nirvana. Muslims have the wali, "the friends of god".
What they all have in common is a sense that the living and the dead are connected - and that after death we continue to be part of the whole. It is a notion which survives in an attenuated secular form in the almost cultic status of Princess Diana.
Who decides you can be one?
In the early days, people were made saints by popular acclamation. Polycarp became one of the first in AD156 , when the faithful collected his bones after his martyrdom and developed the idea that the saint could speak to God on their behalf; he was a halfway house, close to God because of his holiness, but close to men and women because he shared their nature.
For the first 400 years you had to be a martyr to be a saint. But then confessors (outstanding teachers and bishops) and hermits and virgins began to be added. It was the acclamation of local people which was the deciding factor.
Eventually Rome got fed up with this. In AD993, the first saint to be declared by a pope arrived - Ulrich of Augsburg, who was pronounced by Pope John XV. Within about 200 years Pope Alexander III declared that no one should be venerated as a saint without the authority of Rome.
In 1734, Pope Benedict XIV set up a formal system requiring two miracles for beatification, two more for canonisation and a promotor justitiae (Devil's Advocate) whose job it was to thwart the proposed canonisation by any lawful means.
What are the criteria?
Interestingly, many saints were pretty rum characters who led odd lives which no one would want to imitate. Many were far from faultless in their behaviour. But their oddities and failings were greatly outweighed by the way they gave themselves to God "heroically".
The passing of time allowed their faults to fade, leaving only their "heroic virtue" in the general consciousness. A saint, as Ambrose Bierce put it, is merely "a dead sinner, revised and edited".
That said, the point of a saint, for the church, was that he or she offered a model of behaviour to the person in the pew who was far more likely to follow Christ by imitating a hero with a halo than by reading holy texts.
Aren't saints a rather outdated concept?
Reformers have long said so. Calvin, Zwingli and the rest were fierce in their condemnation of saints during the Reformation. The Church of England's Thirty Nine Articles speaks of the cult of saints as "a fond thing vainly invented", allowing Henry VIII to amass huge quantities of swag from the systematic looting of saints' shrines. (English art is much impoverished from the iconoclasm which destroyed countless statues, stained-glass windows, rood screens and murals.)
Anglicanism later decided that it wasn't saints who were bad, so much as what Thomas More called popular credulity, bizarre petitions and spurious relics, on which the pre-Reformation papacy fed. Mind you, Tertullian had complained about much the same kind of thing 1,000 years earlier.
Rome has had its attempts at reform. In the 1960s it downgraded saints such as St George, on the grounds that the historical evidence for his existence was weak, and St Philomena when it was found that her relics were not just bogus but, on closer scrutiny, turned out to be those of a man. Then in 1983 Pope John Paul II rewrote the rules again.
So what do the new rules say?
They halved the need for miracles to just one for beatification and then one more for canonisation. They streamlined the procedure and abolished the Devil's Advocate. They allowed John Paul II to make more saints than all the previous popes of the 20th century put together. He set 1,351 individuals on the road to sainthood; Paul VI did only 56 and the six popes before that just 80.
Did that make for better saints?
It made for saints that John Paul II liked better. Canonisation has always been a political process, and the last pope used it to promote his vision of the kind of Christianity he wanted. His saints mostly fit a particular ideological world view - which is why Mgr Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of the pietistic and reactionary order Opus Dei, has been beatified and the martyred advocate of the poor, Archbishop Oscar Romero, was not. He also honoured a Czech nun beheaded by the Nazis for refusing to remove crucifixes from hospital rooms, a young Italian woman who chose death over rape, and the stigmatic Padre Pio, whom two previous popes regarded as a fraud and whose photograph has even been found in the wallets of arrested Mafiosi.
He has made saints controversial. He fast-tracked Mother Teresa, beatifying the Nobel Peace Prize-winning nun only six years after her death, just as Pope Benedict is fast-tracking John Paul II. Such haste allowed contemporaries to recall that as well as caring for the destitute and dying, the "Angel of Calcutta" had some rather questionable friends among nasty Third World dictators.
That could happen again. There are many people with Aids in Africa, his critics will point out, who have no cause to give thanks to the Vatican and its policy forbidding the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV - or to the man at the helm when the disease reached pandemic proportions, even if he is now called St John Paul.
Should the late Pope be fast-tracked to sainthood?
Yes...
No...
In the old days, you had to wait a long time before they made you a saint. It was 500 years before they canonised Joan of Arc........For the first 400 years you had to be a martyr to be a saint. But then confessors (outstanding teachers and bishops) and hermits and virgins began to be added. It was the acclamation of local people which was the deciding factor.
Eventually Rome got fed up with this. In AD993, the first saint to be declared by a pope arrived - Ulrich of Augsburg, who was pronounced by Pope John XV. Within about 200 years Pope Alexander III declared that no one should be venerated as a saint without the authority of Rome.
In 1734, Pope Benedict XIV set up a formal system requiring two miracles for beatification, two more for canonisation and a promotor justitiae (Devil's Advocate) whose job it was to thwart the proposed canonisation by any lawful means.
Benedict waved the waiting period (as JPII had previously done for Mother Teresa), the customary requirements for sainthood are still intact. There was talk initially of naming JPII a martyr because of the assassination attempt (though it is very unusual, there is no requirement that a martyr actually die), but that seems to have been dropped.
There have been saints in the past who had a fairly quick route to the altars and were practically canonized by acclamation. However, the process that has been in place for quite some time now is slower and more demanding.
The article does have a rather peculiar point of view; I’d hazard a guess and say the writer is way on the liberal side!
That said, however, I’d feel a little better if they waited on canonizing JPII. Popularity shouldn’t be an automatic passport to sainthood. I’d like more discussion of the reasons for his canonization. He wasn’t in the “Doctor of the Church” category, so I suppose it would be heroic virtue of some kind. I thought he died a very good death, very humble and unafraid of suffering and humiliation.
I had forgotten about that...good point.
So did JESUS and his apostles if I remember correctly. They converted them.
This alone should be in the "no" category. It isn't up to the laity to decide "who's in, and who's not." Despite what the liberals who have infected the Church would like to think.
He bore his final illness with extraordinary fortitude and commitment to his church's teachings on the sanctity of life.
God bless him, but extraordinary?
Though he had his faults, the criteria for sainthood allow those to be outweighed by his "heroic virtue"
Never mind kissing the Koran (or was he checking to see if the cover was leather...I always forget...) giving it some sort of "reverence", or the liberal ecumemania at Assisi, where the theme was "Can't we all get along?" But, I guess we'll have to see just what "virtues" will outweigh his "faults."
Heck, the US military used to retire folks a grade higher than their active duty rank....
IMO he ought to be canonized as a “white martyr” thus forgoing the need for miracles. Plus he ought to be officially styled “John Paul the Great” and he ought to be declared a Doctor of the Church. “The Mercy Doctor” since he promulgated the devotion and feast of Divine Mercy and died on the vigil of that feast day.
And for his feast day? Maybe move Our Lady of Fatima to 13 October when the miracle of the Sun happened and have his feast day on 13 May when the attempt was made on his life.
I think his relic ought to be brought to the main floor of St Peter’s and a monument erected as one enters the basilica.
He must never be forgotten! He is the Pope, the saint of the Third Millenium!
Both the Left and the Right hate him but the people love him!
I'd say it's pretty clear what the author's agenda is.
Absolutely.
Some of your stuff is funnier than others.
Oh, no! Say it ain't so, Padre Pio!
What a cruddy journalist! Almost makes me cheer for an early canonization for JP, even though I'm more inclined to let the bureaucratic wheels grind slowly and exceedingly fine.
Yes. He had all the usual lefty buzz-words in there.
GAG
Okay, I recognize the different people can see the same person in different ways, and certainly many revere the person I mentioned (I mean, there is at least one college named after him). And some thoughts can remain unstated from time to time.
This thread was about JPII and while I have no particular opinion on what the RC Church should do, I’ll repeat my oft-stated opinion that JPII was 1/3 of a 20th century holy trinity consisting of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thather and JPII (in addition to his other ordained mission of shepharding his Church). So of any 20th century figure deserving of such recognition, JPII ranks right up there.
Actually, I am thinking better of #10, so I’m committing self-abuse and asking that it be pulled.
Yep. So much so it's not worth the time argue against its faults. Not one of your better posts, but I appreciate your trying.
Bravo.
Maria Goretti? She was canonized by Pius XII, not JPII. Not only is the author's agenda showing, but he didn't even check his facts.
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