UNITED STATES
Washington Monthly
By Kathleen Geier
Over at the New York Review of Books, progressive Catholic icon and public intellectual extraordinaire Garry Wills has written a a terrific blog post about the politics of canonization in the Catholic Church — i.e., the process by which the Church declares someone a saint. In it, Wills includes some fascinating history and analysis, such as this, about the much-misunderstood concept of “papal infallibility”:
Modern popes have been chary of invoking the suspect “charism,” or divine gift, of infallibility, a power Pius IX [who reined from 1846 to 1878] wrested from his captive Vatican Council. It is a power used only once in the technical sense, in Pius XII’s 1950 definition of a non-controversial doctrine (Mary’s assumption into heaven). But, in place of infallibility, recent popes have found many ways of describing their acts as almost-infallible, irreversible, universal. That is where the canonization process comes in so handily. It gives the pope a kind of back-door infallibility. He says definitively that a person is in heaven, and can work miracles, and worked particular ones (or, for John XXIII, a single one).
Wills’ main argument is that the Vatican’s recent canonization of Pope John Paul II is extremely ill-advised, largely because John Paul “presided over the church during its worldwide pedophile scandal.” Wills asks, rather brutally but, I think, completely fairly, “Who can think that a saint in heaven ever protected a predatory priest?” Indeed.
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