UNITED STATES
Religion Dispatches
Post by PATRICIA MILLER
Is it my imagination, or has the process of canonizing saints in the Catholic Church largely become a circular process by which popes justify the political agendas of their predecessors?
When I was a kid growing up in the Catholic Church, sainthood was a long and mysterious process. I remember the excitement surrounding the canonization of Elizabeth Ann Seton not only because she was the first American-born saint, but because the order of nuns who taught at the Catholic elementary and high schools that I attended was founded in her honor and had waited a long time for her elevation to sainthood.
Seton founded the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s, the first religious order in the United States, which gave birth to numerous orders under the Sisters of Charity umbrella. She pioneered the Catholic parochial school system, with its emphasis on serving poor children, before dying of TB in 1821 at the age of 46. She was beatified by Pope John XXIII in 1963 and canonized twelve years later in 1975 by Pope Paul VI.
It took 154 years for Seton to become a saint. By contrast, Pope John Paul II, who will be canonized Sunday, died in 2005, making his nine-year march to sainthood the fastest in the church’s history. His successor Pope Benedict waved the normal five-year waiting period so that his sainthood could be considered immediately and it was fast-tracked from there on in.
The benefit of the church’s traditional slow march to sainthood was that it removed the canonization of any individual from the politics of any particular papacy. You really had to stand the test of time to be made a saint in the Catholic Church. But now we see Benedict, who as head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith created the rightward-leaning theology that fueled John Paul’s papacy and served as its chief enforcer, nominating his old boss for sainthood practically the moment he shuffled off his moral coil.
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