Inside the Vatican’s Secret Saint-Making Process
December 05, 2024 at 12:41AMCanonization has long been a way for the Catholic church to shape its image. The Vatican is preparing to anoint its first millennial saint, but how does it decide who is worthy? Linda Kinstler goes inside the apparatus that has been choosing saints for centuries. Fans of the movie Conclave will salivate reading this story:
The dicastery’s daily operations are kept out of the public eye. Father Angelo Romano, the newly appointed general relator of the dicastery, would not allow me to take photographs inside or to record our conversation, and just as a prosecutor or judge cannot discuss the details of ongoing litigation, he could not speak to me about any saintly investigations in progress. “We are a very peculiar court,” he said. “There is no point when a Cause will be dismissed, and there is no statute of limitations.” Romano estimates that the office is now working on no fewer than 1,600 Causes, some of which date back to the 15th century.
Who gets to be a saint is not just about holiness; it is about identity, politics, economics and geography. The historian Peter Burke regards saints as “cultural indicators, a sort of historical litmus paper sensitive to conditions between religion and society.” Canonization has long been a way for the Catholic church to shape its image, and the Vatican has an incentive to approve candidates with useful profiles. In Acutis, the Holy See found an avenue to connect with a younger generation. From the moment his Cause was officially opened, Acutis was referred to as potentially “the first millennial saint.” He has been nicknamed “God’s influencer” and “the patron saint of the internet.”
Few Causes have proceeded as quickly as his. Today, a small but active community of Black Catholics is petitioning the Vatican for the accelerated canonisation of six Black American candidates for sainthood, the oldest of whom, Pierre Toussaint, has been dead for 171 years. In 2012, the first Native American saint, Kateri Tekakwitha, was approved for canonization, 332 years after her death. Until 1983, when Pope John Paul II attempted to modernize the process, a Cause could not even be opened until the candidate had been dead for 50 years. (He reduced the waiting period to five years, halved the number of miracles required, and did away with the office of the “devil’s advocate,” established in 1587, whose role was to raise objections to every case.)
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/04/inside-the-vaticans-secret-saint-making-process/
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