VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
America [New York NY]
April 23, 2025
By Kathleen Sprows Cummings
It is both poignant and fitting that one of Pope Francis’ last official acts was to advance the causes of seven candidates for canonization. Francis’ prolificacy in naming saints outpaced even that of St. John Paul II, who canonized 482 people during his 27 years as pope, more than all of his predecessors combined. Pope Francis named almost double that number in just 12 years. Admittedly, that total—942—is skewed by the inclusion of the canonization of the 813 martyrs of Otranto. Even so, Francis’ penchant for saint-making was impressive—and telling. A person’s heroes often point to their values. In Francis’ case, the people he singled out for their heroic virtues reveal a great deal about his papal priorities.
Francis did not necessarily have a special connection to everyone he raised to the honors of the altar; most causes simply happened to reach the final stages of a long process during his pontificate. St. John Paul II had beatified 1,341 people, creating a backlog of people on the road to canonization that his successors inherited. This list put Pope Benedict in an interesting position. In 1989, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he wondered whether John Paul II’s assertiveness in canonization had led to“troppi santi” (“too many saints”), and not long after his election, he suggested he was going to be more selective on that front. Francis, by contrast, relished the power of saint-making and frequently harnessed it to express his vision for the Catholic Church.
The most common way popes accelerate causes for canonization is by granting dispensations from required miracles. The process for certifying intercessory miracles is complicated and time-consuming, and as medical advances continue to shrink the realm of the medically inexplicable, they are ever more elusive. In his 1983 apostolic constitution “Divinus Perfectionis Magister,” the first comprehensive reform of the canonization process in centuries, John Paul II reduced the number of miracles required for canonization from two to one. Popes, of course, are entitled to grant additional exemptions, and Pope Francis did this early in his papacy in a powerfully symbolic gesture.
In 2005, crowds at John Paul II’s funeral chanted “santo subito” (“sainthood immediately”), invoking an early church practice, long before formal procedures were in place, when saints were proclaimed by popular acclamation. Though Pope Benedict opted not to forgo the entire canonization process for the recently deceased pope, he and others made certain it proceeded exceptionally swiftly. John Paul II was beatified in 2011 and ready for canonization by early 2014.
In the lead-up to John Paul’s canonization, Francis introduced a twist: He would canonize a second pope on the same day: Pope John XXIII, who died in the middle of the Second Vatican Council. John Paul II beatified him in 2000, but he was still awaiting a second miracle. Pope Francis’ decision to waive that requirement resulted in an extraordinary pairing that was designed to reconcile competing factions in the church. In celebrating a joint canonization, Pope Francis was suggesting that the church was capacious enough to include progressives who felt a kinship with the Vatican II pope and conservatives who considered John Paul II as their hero.
The most efficient way to accelerate a cause for canonization is to bypass the process altogether and declare a saint through a papal decree, not in santo subito fashion but in fact its inverse, in recognition of a long and lasting devotion to a person. This is called equipollent canonization. Whereas Pope John Paul II had employed it in only one instance (for St. Kinga of Poland, canonized in 1999), Pope Francis named 23 new saints in this manner.
One of these was the Jesuit Peter Faber, an early companion of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier. The latter two were canonized way back in 1622, but Faber was not even beatified until 1872 and there had not been much forward movement for his cause since then. In an interview with Antonio Spadaro, S.J., in September 2013 (the English version of which was published in America), Pope Francis explained why Faber inspired him. The “reform priest” had an ability to “dialogue with all, even the most remote and even with his opponents.” Francis admired Faber’s simple piety, his ready availability, “his careful interior discernment,” and his ability to make “great and strong decisions” while remaining “gentle and loving.”
On Dec. 17, 2013, Francis’ 77th birthday, he proclaimed Faber a saint. It was not so much a gift to himself but a present to the entire church, in that he was signaling the values that would guide his approach to leadership and reform. Quoting the Faber scholar Michel de Certeau, S.J., Father Spadaro realized that Pope Francis, like Faber, always sought to integrate “interior experience, dogmatic expression, and structural reform.” In retrospect, it is clear this fusion animated the process and outcome of Francis’ 2022 reorganization of the Roman Curia.
An Outward-Oriented Church
Francis provided another early indicator of his priorities on March 9, 2013, during his intervention at a general congregation that preceded the conclave at which he was elected pope. Comparing a church that was internally focused and “self-referential” to the bent-over woman in Luke’s Gospel, the then-cardinal from Argentina reimagined a passage from the Book of Revelation that refers to Jesus “standing at the door and knocking.” Obviously, he said, it implies that Jesus is outside, seeking permission to enter. But suppose, he posited, Jesus is knocking from inside the church, urging to be let out? This speech captured the attention of many of his brother cardinals and played a decisive role in his election a few days later.
The evocative metaphor of an outward-oriented church also manifested itself in a number of the saints Francis elevated. On April 3, 2014, Francis announced the equipollent canonization of three Europeans who carried the Gospel to the church’s outer edges in the 16th and 17th centuries: Marie of the Incarnation, a French-born Ursuline sister who served in Quebec between 1639 and 1672; her contemporary, Francois Laval, Quebec’s first bishop; and José de Anchieta, S.J., a native of the Canary Islands and poet considered to be one of the founders of São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. All three causes had languished since the beatifications in 1980. Had the first pope from the Americas not intervened on their behalf, it is likely these early evangelizers of those continents would have remained permanent beati.
Pope Francis also emphasized his vision of an outward-facing church through his canonization, in January 2015, of Joseph Vaz, a native of Goa who served as a missionary to Sri Lanka. In his homily at the canonization Mass, Pope Francis praised Vaz as a saint who “teaches us how to go out to the peripheries, to make Jesus Christ everywhere known and loved.” The venue underscored the message: Vaz’s elevation took place not at the Vatican but in Sri Lanka, as part of Francis’ travels to Asia. Francis was following a precedent set by John Paul II, who had presided at the first fuori sede (“outside the Holy See”) canonization in 1983, during his pastoral visit to Seoul, when he canonized 104 Korean victims of anti-Christian persecution.
On the flight from Sri Lanka to the Philippines, the next stop on his Asian visit, Pope Francis announced his next fuori sede canonization—and it was a startling one. The following September, he told journalists, he would preside over the first canonization on U.S. soil. What was remarkable was not the locale (the United States was long overdue in this regard; John Paul II had hoped to canonize an American during his 1987 trip to the U.S. states, but plans fell through) but rather the honoree: Blessed Junípero Serra, a Spanish Franciscan who founded nine California missions between 1769 and 1782.
As it happened, I was writing a book about American saints, and had just finished a chapter in which I predicted—based on considerable evidence I found in the Franciscan provincial archives—that Serra would retain his blessed status in perpetuity. The Franciscans had launched Serra’s cause in 1931, largely in response to the canonization of eight North American Jesuit martyrs the year before (congregational competition is often a fierce motivator in saint-making!) and it had gained traction in large part because Serra was well known throughout California. But by the time Serra was beatified in 1988, the European missionary enterprise in North America had become inextricably intertwined with the harsh legacy of colonization, and Serra’s cause suffered as a result. The Franciscans weathered the protests that followed Serra’s beatification, but by the early 2000s, the congregation stopped pursuing the cause actively, deciding not to comment on the negative stories that periodically surfaced. Francis’ announcement also caught the Franciscans off guard. The friar in charge of Serra’s cause went on record saying he “was the last to know.”
I suspect geography was at play in Francis’ decision to canonize Serra. Recall that in making his first and only visit to the United States, Pope Francis was fulfilling his predecessor’s commitment to attend the 2015 World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia. That promise locked him into an East Coast itinerary. Had Francis designed his own trip, it probably would have included cities closer to the southern border; Serra’s elevation accomplished that, at least metaphorically. Still, it seems to have been a miscalculation on Francis’ part, as Indigenous protests against Serra garnered at least as much attention as his canonization.
More consonant with Pope Francis’ style was a historic canonization he presided at a few weeks after his return from the United States: that of Zelie and Louis Martin, the parents of Thérèse of Lisieux, also known as the Little Flower. The Catholic hierarchy had acknowledged the need for more lay saints, especially married couples, since the Second Vatican Council, but the practicalities of the canonization process worked against it. A couple’s children, and perhaps even their grandchildren, might think them saints worthy of universal veneration, but momentum is hard to sustain, let alone finance, beyond the third generation.
Francis used the Martins’ canonization to reinforce the beauty of family life, which he would extol the next year in his apostolic exhortation “Amoris Laetitia.” In that text, he referred to three saints who were fervently devoted to the Holy Family: the Martins’ daughter, Thérèse; his own namesake, Francis of Assisi; and Blessed Charles de Foucauld, a French-born missionary to Algeria who lived as a hermit until his assassination in 1916. Francis had also named Foucauld in “Laudato Sí’”; and in the last sentences of “Fratelli Tutti,” he wrote that Blessed Charles had inspired the document. Here again he connected contemplation with action, praising Foucauld for drawing upon “his intense experience of God” to “make a journey of transformation towards feeling a brother to all.” These frequent mentions of Foucauld surely helped nudge him to his canonization in 2022. A cause succeeds in part because of effective marketing, and papal invocations go a long way in that area.
Given the thousands of open causes at the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, another indicator that a pope has put his finger on the scale occurs when a saint’s beatification and canonization both occur during his pontificate. This was the case for Óscar Romero, the archbishop martyred in El Salvador at the hands of a military dictatorship—a cause that resonated with the pope, who lived through Argentina’s so-called Dirty War. It was also true of María Antonia de Paz y Figueroa, a Catholic religious sister who became Argentina’s first female canonized saint in February 2024. The Jesuit pope had another reason to love his compatriot; “Mama Antula” preserved and promoted the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius throughout Argentina after the Jesuits were expelled from that country in 1767.
Last summer, Pope Francis authorized the canonization of Carlo Acutis, the “gamer saint” whom he had beatified in 2020. Now his successor will preside over the ceremony, but devotion to the first millennial saint will reinforce the late pope’s efforts to reach out to young people and his hope that new technology will be placed in the service of evangelization. Indeed, future canonizations, including many of the 1,500 people he beatified, will continue to shape the church long after the end of his pontificate.
Rest in peace, Francis, together with the saints you loved so much.
Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly referred to the general congregations that precede a papal conclave as the General Congregation of the Society of Jesus. The former is a series of meetings held by cardinals before electing a new pope; the latter refers to a governing assembly of the Jesuit order.
Kathleen Sprows Cummings is a professor of American studies and history at Notre Dame and author, most recently, of A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American.