Publicly Proclaimed Papal Holiness
National Catholic Register, 08 September 2022
The beatification of Pope John Paul I invites a few considerations on papal causes for beatification and canonization.
The beatification of Pope John Paul I on Sunday was, like the raising of any Christian disciple to the altars, a recognition of God’s grace at work in the sanctification of a soul. Yet it is also true that Albino Luciani, however holy he may have been as a priest and bishop, would never have attracted sufficient attention for a beatification cause to be opened if he had not served as pope for 33 days in 1978.
Thus the beatification of a pope — the fifth such in this still young century — invites a few considerations on papal causes for beatification and canonization.
Popes are beatified on the same grounds as everyone else — personal holiness sufficiently manifest that it is widely recognized, both during life and after death. They undergo the same process as any other cause, albeit with greater attention paid.
Beatification is not intended to be a historical judgment on their pontificate, no matter how much it might be interpreted as such. St. John Paul II made that clear when beatifying two of his predecessors, Pius IX and John XXIII, who governed the Church in the face of quite different historical challenges.
“It is precisely their holiness that we recognize today,” he preached on Sept. 3 of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000. “Holiness lives in history and no saint has escaped the limits and conditioning which are part of our human nature. In beatifying one of her sons, the Church does not celebrate the specific historical decisions he may have made, but rather points to him as someone to be imitated and venerated because of his virtues, in praise of the divine grace which shines resplendently in him.”
A Preferential Option for Popes?
Popes ought to be good candidates for sainthood. They are very well known and, if they are indeed holy, a great many people witness that. Their lives are well-documented and records are easily obtained. The same practical reasons that make it easy for religious orders to advance the causes of their members — and which make it difficult to advance the causes of ordinary lay Catholics — apply all the more to popes.
That being said, in different historical periods papal canonizations were more or less common. At the beginning it was the norm.
“Eighty-one popes are saints, and an additional ten have been beatified,” writes Brendan Hodge at The Pillar. “Of those 81 saints, 49 began their pontificates within the first 500 years of the Church’s history.”
Then papal canonizations dried up. After St. Pius V (pope from 1566-1572), the next pope to be canonized reigned more than 300 years later, St. Pius X (1903-1914).
Is it traditional for popes to be canonized? It depends which period of history is considered the norm. We are now in another period of publicly proclaimed papal holiness:
Pius IX is beatified, (1846-1878).
There is no active cause for his successor Leo XIII (1878-1903), despite his essential role in positioning the Church for a return to its evangelical roots.
Pius X has already been canonized.
There are no causes for the next two, Benedict XV (1914-1922) and Pius XI (1922-1939).
Pope Pius XII (1938-1958) has already been declared “Venerable” meaning that only a miracle is needed for his beatification.
Then the saints veritably go marching in:
St. John XXIII (1958-1962)
St. Paul VI (1962-1978)
Blessed John Paul I (1978)
St. John Paul II (1978-2005)
There are no active causes for Benedict XVI or Pope Francis, both failing to meet the first criterion for sainthood: being dead. And yet, speaking of the impressive parade of his predecessors, the Holy Father joked in 2018 that after Paul VI and John Paul I, “Benedict and I are on the waiting list! Pray for us.”
More than once the joke has been heard among veteran Roman observers that Francis, never one to be shackled by hidebound conventions, will boldly break all precedent and beatify Benedict and himself before his death.
Coinage Debased?
There are murmurings in Rome that in beatifying several recent popes the value becomes diminished, a halo becoming posthumous retirement gift. Some critics have suggested that that is precisely the point, to diminish the canonization of John Paul the Great by making it seem routine. Grist for that mill was provided by Pope Francis exempting John XXIII from the requirement of a second miracle for canonization in order that he could be canonized alongside John Paul II.
The too-many-popes-on-the-list criticism is a version of the criticism made against John Paul when he dramatically revised the procedures for canonization in 1983, shortening the waiting period from 50 years to five, and reducing by half the number of miracles needed. The resulting explosion in new blesseds and saints, especially from recent decades, was thought by some to be too much. John Paul thought it exactly right; that there could not be too many saints. In any case, the Church only recognizes the saints God has made, he argued, and thus the fault lies elsewhere and upward.
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