Vatican X Factor

Simon Jenkins pokes fun in The Guardian at the X Factor process by which people become saints in the Catholic Church - I thought Simon's references to a 'trade union stitch-up' and the House of Lords particularly apt.

Of all Catholic rituals, canonisation is nonsense

So former popes John XXIII and John Paul II are saints for their 'miracles'. At such times I sympathise with intelligent Catholics


By Simon Jenkins - The Guardian

Cut-outs of Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII are held aloft by pilgrims attending the double canonisation in St Peter's Square, Vatican City, on Sunday. Photograph: Angelo Carconi/EPA

Two new saints were declared at the weekend. Amid euphoric scenes in Vatican Square, Pope Francis defied his modernisation drive by canonising two of his recent predecessors. The world's press indulged the occasion as one of universal joy. Even if they did regard it as barking mad, they thought it bad form to rain on someone else's parade.

Of all Catholic rituals, sanctification drips with medieval nonsense. A prospective saint is nominated, investigated by a committee and, if displaying "heroic virtues", is tested for a miracle. Since a miracle is an act of God answering a prayer, it must be medically "inexplicable", putting some pressure on the doctors concerned. Only martyrs do not need miracles for saintliness.

This leads to beatification, followed by canonisation if a second miracle is "scientifically proven" within five years of the candidate's death. Apparently the potency of saintly intercession wanes after a period. These rules can be waived if the candidate is a huge celebrity, like Mother Teresa. The committee was clearly keen on John XXIII and John Paul II, even if it seemed a trade union stitch-up for popes to move so briskly from office to sanctity. It is an echo of Britain's House of Lords.

At such times I can sympathise with intelligent Catholics. Loyal to their tribe, they wrestle with virgin birth, papal infallibility, transubstantiation and much nonsense about sex. They explain away the rituals of the church as clothing God's relationship with humans in familiar metaphors and ceremonies; some punitive, some heart-warming, like sainthood. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints – which oversees the canonisation process – should be seen as merely conducting a Vatican X Factor.

I am less indulgent. There is a notorious potency to the narratives of religious faith, throughout history a means by which elites have ruled the lives of the gullible. At a time when more death and destruction is being perpetrated in the name of religion than for many decades past, sensible people should guard against nonsense in its name, however ostensibly harmless.

Western atheists may deride what they see as authoritarian and intolerant aspects of Islam, the Hindu worship of deities in animal form, voodoo or the zanier tenets of oriental mysticism. It sees them as holding back the march of reason and civilisation, indeed of democracy and peace. The Catholic predilection for saints is the same. Religion may be a comfort to millions, to be respected as such, but it is also a menace to millions and as such deserves no respect at all.

Miracle Whip (29 April 2014)

The politics of the Pope's decision to create two new saints is explained in this article by Paul Vallely in The Independent although it doesn't go into any detail about the alleged miracles which have elevated John Paul II and John XXIII to the sainthood. 

I can't say I'm terribly excited one way or the other about the creation of another two saints to join the 10,000 or so others which exist in the mind of the Catholic Church.

But in this day and age I do think the church should be resisting bogus claims about these people being responsible for 'miracles' such religious mumbo jumbo encourages me to ask why Pope John Paul II created 483 saints - compared with just 98 from all of his 20th century predecessors?

How to build a saint: Pope Francis is elevating two recent predecessors today - so what does it take to be canonised?

A life of virtue helps. And a miracle or two. Finally, though, the Vatican might be swayed by low politics. Paul Vallely explores the unheavenly business of sainthood

By PAUL VALLELY- The Independent

You might think that, since the Catholic Church has more than 10,000 saints, two more might be neither here nor there. But the two men who are to be canonised today are much more than another couple of symbols of sanctity.

In Vatican City's St Peter's Square at 10am this morning, Pope Francis will confer his church's greatest accolade on two of his predecessors as Pope. But the process which has led to the ceremony reveals that there is nothing otherworldly about the business of making saints – and it uncovers some illuminating truths about the Church of which 1.2 billion people across the world are members.

The two new saints will be Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005, and Pope John XXIII, who died in 1963; yet the two are a study in contrasts.

The supporters of the more recent of the pair, the Polish Pope, John Paul II, are clear about the case for his canonisation. The globe-trotting rock-stadium pontiff was the most popular pope of modern times. He visited 129 countries during his 27-year pontificate and some 17 million people travelled to Rome to see him. He was the first pope to visit a synagogue and mosque. He made public apologies for the Crusades and the persecution of Galileo and begged forgiveness for centuries of Christian slander of the Jews. He played a key role in the fall of 20th-century Communism. And he gave dignity to the dying by the public way in which he handled his own protracted final illness. His disciples already call him John Paul the Great.

The trouble is that he also suppressed debate within the Church, censured theologians, ignored a dysfunctional bureaucracy within the Vatican and for decades did little to nothing about the scandal of clerical sex abuse which was first revealed as a large-scale problem in his time.

All that was ignored, however, by his devotees who flocked to Rome after his death, chanting "Santo Subito" ("Make him a saint now") outside the papal apartments.

The pope who followed, Benedict XVI, took the hint and scrapped the rule which usually requires that the track to sainthood cannot begin until at least five years after a candidate's death. It suited Benedict for political reasons. The move consolidated the conservative legacy of the Polish pope, which Benedict wanted to reinforce. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI worked hard to row back on the changes which had turned the Church upside-down in the 1960s after the revolutionary Second Vatican Council opened up Catholicism to the modern world.

When the latest pope, Francis, was elected, the conveyor belt to canonisation for John Paul II was already unstoppable. That is where the politics got even more complicated. Francis is an enthusiast for the Second Vatican Council, and has declared that there can be "no turning back the clock" on its changes. Indeed, he said, they have not gone far enough.

So Pope Francis decided to mirror the canonisation of John Paul II with that of John XXIII, the smiling, wise-cracking pontiff who launched the Second Vatican revolution and whose admirers call him the Good Pope. It is a very deft piece of political footwork.

So today in Rome a papal odd couple, the Great and the Good, will be linked in a clear attempt to arrest the drift to conservatism which has characterised the Catholic Church for the past three decades.

There has long been a political element to the creation of saints. For the first 1,000 years of Christianity, saints were simply declared by popular acclamation among believers – the original vox populi. Believers voted with their feet by visiting the tombs of dead individuals they regarded as particularly holy.

Local bishops went on to declare such people to be saints – which merely amounted to an affirmation that the venerated individuals must now be with God in heaven. It was a good way, they decided, of giving Christian role models to illiterate believers who had only a limited understanding of the subtlety of abstract theology. From the 4th century on there are accounts of miracles – events contrary to the laws of nature – being credited to saints to whom believers prayed.

It was also a handy way of ensuring that every region got a saint whose remains and relics would be a focus for pilgrims bringing donations, and thereby economic and political power, to a bishop's cathedral.

But in the high Middle Ages, the Church authorities in Rome decided it would be better if they took control of the business, to ensure that everyone got the right idea of what it meant to live out the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity and the moral virtues of wisdom, prudence, justice, temperance and courage.

In 1170, Pope Alexander III issued a decree saying that only the pontiff could say who was to be saint. In 1234, Pope Gregory IX established procedures to investigate the life of a candidate and any miracles attributed to them. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V entrusted the process to a body now known as the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. The rules were constantly tightened by Rome, which also set up rules for the authentification of sacred relics that proliferated preposterously in the medieval era. There was said to be enough wood in relics from the True Cross to build a galleon.

There have been two major reforms in recent years. In the 1960s, Pope Paul VI ordered a review of the Roman canon of saints, which weeded out many found to be legends rather than historic facts. St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers – who legendarily carried the Christ-child across a river but found himself unable to manage since the boy carried the weight of the world on his shoulders – was one such who went.

Then, in 1983, John Paul II made sweeping changes to the canonisation process. He abolished the Devil's Advocate, a canon lawyer tasked with making the case against a candidate for sainthood. The Pope's intention was to enable himself to declare more saints from the ranks of ordinary people among a wider range of nationalities to create more representative exemplars for the average person in the pew. He made the whole process faster and simpler.

The great and the good: Pope John Paul II (1978-2005) and Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) will be canonised today (AFP/Getty Images)

As a result, Pope John Paul II then declared more saints than all the popes in the half- millennium before him. He created 483 new saints – compared with just 98 from all his 20th- century predecessors. He also beatified 1,300 more, giving them the precursor status to being a full saint (see box, below). One of the most select clubs known to humankind thus became a lot less exclusive. It also became a little more geographically representative, with figures from Africa, Asia and Latin America – where the church is growing fast – being added to the overwhelmingly European canon of saints.

Saint-making has always been political. The Church of England does not do saints but sections of it have canonised King Charles I of England, a gesture which may have been more of an institutional antidote to regicide than a recognition of personal holiness. And in the Orthodox churches – where the Eastern, Oriental and Russian branches have made large numbers of saints independently of one another – the semi-autonomous Russian Orthodox Church Abroad has canonised Tsar Nicholas II and the rest of the Romanovs who were murdered by the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg during the Russian Revolution in 1918.

Political lobbying is part of the process. The conservative Opus Dei group, favoured by Pope John Paul II, successfully pressed him to canonise the order's dubious founder, Josemaría Escriva, who was made a saint in record time. By contrast, the process to canonise Oscar Romero – the archbishop murdered at his altar in 1980 by right-wing death squads in El Salvador – was blocked under John Paul II and Benedict XVI because his cause was backed by left-wingers of whom the popes were suspicious.

Pope John Paul II also used sainthood to promote the issues which should preoccupy the church. Among those he canonised was an Italian paediatrician, Gianna Beretta Molla, who died in 1962, aged 39, days after giving birth to her fourth child. During her pregnancy, doctors had found a tumour in her uterus and told her she would die if she did not have it removed – which would have had the side-effect of killing her unborn baby in the process. She refused and died. Saint Gianna was subsequently praised by John Paul II for her "extreme sacrifice".

Miracles are also central to the business of being made a saint. Ordinary Catholics can pray to a dead person they regard as holy and ask them to intercede with God to perform a miracle on their behalf. If the miracle materialises, the Church argues, that must prove the dead person is in heaven. To investigate claims of miraculous cures, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome employs teams of doctors to check proposed cases.

Not all of these doctors are Catholics and some are asked to make medical judgements without being told why. Canadian professor Dr Jacalyn Duffin, an atheist, thought she was checking fatal leukaemia cells for a post-mortem and was staggered to discover they belonged to someone who was alive, having undergone an inexplicable cure. Dr Duffin is still an atheist but now says: "I believe in miracles – wondrous things that happen for which we can find no scientific explanation."

The arrival of Pope Francis has brought a shift of emphasis. True, early on he canonised 813 individuals who were martyred at Otranto in southern Italy after refusing to convert to Islam in 1480. But those saints were already in the pipeline when he became Pope; the announcement had been made by Pope Benedict, who had rather overshadowed the news by declaring at the ceremony that he was to become the first pope to resign for 600 years.

Francis showed his impatience with the old procedures by unilaterally waiving the need for a second miracle, in order to push through the sainthood of Pope John XXIII on the same day as John Paul II to bridge the old divide between progressive and conservative Catholics. What's more, he has lifted the block on Oscar Romero becoming a saint. But it seems unlikely from all the other signs he has given that Pope Francis will be creating huge rafts of new saints as his two predecessors have done.

Nor should he. There is something faintly unseemly, and distinctly political, about recently dead popes being fast-tracked to sanctity. Elsewhere, the Church is fond of saying that it likes to think not in years but in centuries. Popes should not be declared saints until at least a few hundred years have been allowed to elapse to let contemporary controversies settle into the dust of history.

'Pope Francis: Untying the Knots', by Paul Vallely, is published by Bloomsbury, priced £12.99
Canon fodder: The saintly process


10,000The Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints believes there are at least 10,000 saints.

483
Pope John Paul II created 483 new saints – compared with just 98 made by all his 20th-century predecessors.

British saints

Saint: Thomas Becket Canonised in 1173.

On his way: John Henry Newman The most recent British beatification, Newman left the Anglican Communion to become a Catholic in the 19th century.

Not a saint: Henry VI Unsuccessfully proposed for canonisation, despite the attribution of several miracles.

The great and the good

Pope John Paul II (1978-2005) and Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) will be canonised today.
4 steps to heaven

Step 1 - Once you have been dead for five years someone can propose you become a saint. Your local bishop will check that there is no huge scandal in your life and the "purity of doctrine" in your writings. Witnesses are called. A report is sent to Rome.

Step 2 - The Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Rome will check that you have lived a life of "heroic virtue". If satisfied, it will ask the Pope to declare you Venerable.

Step 3 - Next you have to perform an indisputable miracle from beyond the grave. This is an "immediate, complete and spontaneous" cure of a serious disease or condition which medical science cannot explain or refute. You do this to someone who has prayed to you. If you were a martyr you can skip this step. Once the miracle is verified, you are beatified and called Blessed.

Step 4 - Another miracle is needed for canonisation. Again you cure someone who has prayed to you to intercede with God for them. This proves you are in heaven. Once the miracle is certified, a Canonisation Mass is held, you are given a Feast Day and thereafter called Saint. The decision is infallible and irrevocable.

Fakirs and Fraudsters (25 August 2013)

Here's an excellent article by David Aaronovitch which appeared in the Times the other day.

Seems to me that for the most part at least the world's secular countries have 'tamed' religion - so that it has a proper place in society which allows ordinary citizens to believe what they like and worship freely, if they want to of course - so long as they don't try to impose their religion or religious outlook on others.

Which is, of course, as it should be - the great escapologist, Harry Houdini, might well have met the same fate as Dr Dabholkar, sadly, because he too was committed to exposing the false fakirs and fraudsters of his own era - who fleeced lots of American citizens with staged seances and bogus claims about being able to communicate with dead loved ones - who had passed to the 'other side'. 

So, I tip my hat to Dr Dabolkhar - because standing up for the truth, as you believe it to be, can be a very uncomfortable experience, but it is something that people should be able to do in civilized countries - without paying a terrible personal price or, even, forfeiting their lives.      

He argued and argued. So he was murdered

By David Aaronovitch

The death of a brave Indian rationalist reminds us that people are still killed simply for opening their mouth

On Monday night Dr Narendra Dabholkar, a man in his late sixties, took an evening train from Mumbai to Pune. He arrived after midnight, but still got up early the next morning to go for a walk in the Sambhaji Garden. Shortly after 7am two men, who had parked their Honda motorbikes by a Hindu temple, walked up to Dr Dabholkar and shot him four times in the head and body. By the time the police arrived he was dying.

To some of the people who knew of him Dr Dabholkar was a hero of an unlikely kind. For years he had led a campaign against superstition in India, against the false fakirs and miraculous charlatans, who took the money of the credulous and left them with nothing or — often — worse than nothing. He died as his home state of Maharashtra was, finally, about to pass an anti-superstition bill outlawing the most dangerous practices of the various babas and yogis who infest that place.

Dr Dabholkar relied on one weapon alone. Reason. He never hurt anyone, never threatened anyone, never roused a mob to attack a building containing his enemies. He published magazines, articles, appeared on television and argued, argued, argued. And for that cursed arguing he was murdered.

India, though prey to superstition and various mumbo-jumbos (or perhaps because it is prey to these things), has given birth to a vigorous and often brilliant rationalist movement. Times readers may remember the report of the activities of Sanal Edamaruku, the head of the Indian Rationalist Association. When a celebrated tantric guru claimed on television that he could kill a man using only his magical powers, Mr Edamaruku challenged him to prove it. In front of millions the berobed guru Pandit Surender Sharma chanted, sprinkled, waved a knife and fluttered his hands for hours, and Mr Edamaraku simply smiled. And lived.

But Mr Edamaruku has always run risks by interfering with people’s beliefs and the economy that feeds on those beliefs. He had a burning clay pot smashed in his face by a faking fakir and was threatened with arrest by the government of the state of Kerala when he revealed that it was their officials — like baddies in Scooby-Doo — who were behind the flaming apparitions that drew many money-spending pilgrims to behold the miraculous fires.

Last year Mr Edamaruku offended the Roman Catholics of Mumbai by showing how a “miracle” involving a water-dripping statue of Christ on the Cross was no such thing. They then sought to have him arrested for having broken a section of the penal code outlawing “outraging the religious feelings of any class”. The penalty for such outraging of feelings is up to three years in jail. Fearing there was a reasonable chance of him ending up in Mumbai chokey, Mr Edamaruku decamped for Finland.

Rationalists don’t make good martyrs, though enough of them have been killed over the years. In Paris a friend recently came across the statue of a rather casual-looking young man known as the Chevalier de la Barre. This particular monument replaced another removed and melted down during the Occupation at the behest of Marshal Pétain. The original had shown de la Barre being burnt at the stake and had stood outside the Sacré-Coeur church in Montmartre.

In the summer of 1765, in Abbeville, a large wooden crucifix was damaged by a vandal. Popular opinion was outraged, but no one knew who had done it. A local 19-year-old rake, Chevalier de la Barre had, however, been seen ostentatiously not doffing his hat to a Corpus Christi procession. When his room was raided he was discovered to possess erotic literature and, worse, a copy of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary.

For this he was sentenced to have his tongue cut out, his legs crushed, his head cut off and to be burnt at the stake together with his copy of Voltaire. A statue was erected before the Great War, then moved to somewhere less offensive to the Church, destroyed and then, finally, remade in 2002.

The French at least have a statue. Britain’s last rationalist martyr, Thomas Aikenhead, has, as far as I know, no memorial at all. A student at Edinburgh University, Aikenhead had had the gall to tell friends that he thought that the holy scriptures were fables and poetical fictions, that miracles were just pranks and that the idea of the Holy Trinity was preposterous. For this he was prosecuted for blasphemy and sentenced to be hanged. The Church of Scotland, who had the power of intercession, refused, citing its fear of “abounding impiety and profanity”. On January 8, 1697, the boy was put to death in front of a large crowd.

Even when it was just one young student, the threat to the beliefs of the society around him, to the “feelings” of the pious, had been too great to permit him to live. There was no question of him hurting anyone or raising rebellion. He had argued, and the thing that could not be borne was argument.

In modern Pakistan and Iran people are still being persecuted for the crime of blasphemy — for the sin of saying or doing something that offends the sensibilities of believers. This week the Muslim cleric in Islamabad who was accused of framing a Christian girl, Rimsha Masih, for having burnt pages of the Koran, was freed and charges were dismissed. By then the girl and her whole family had fled to exile in Canada and the other Christians who had lived in the area had felt obliged to move out. Out of fear.

The case of Asia Bibi, the Christian woman accused of blaspheming against the Prophet as part of a village argument by a well, has led to the killing of one — if not two — Pakistani politicians. Bibi was sentenced to death by hanging and her case was taken up by the Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer. Taseer argued that the Pakistani blasphemy laws, which among things outlaw the “wounding of the religious feelings of any person” by any word, any sound or any gesture, or placing “an object in the sight of that person”, should be repealed.

For making this case Taseer was pilloried in the Pakistani media, threatened by clerics and in January 2011 murdered by one of his own bodyguards. The assassin-bodyguard became a hero. Taseer, wrote his son Aatish, though religious, had wished for “a society built on the achievements of men, on science, on rationality, on modernity” and was killed, said Aatish, by a man “whose vision of the world could admit no other”.

Malala Yousafzai, the schoolgirl who upset the Taleban by wanting an education, very nearly became another such martyr: for arguing, not for hurting anyone. In the country she left, Asia Bibi is still in prison under sentence of death, being moved from jail to jail in case someone piously slits her throat. No one in the Pakistani Government dares to call for her release.

I daresay Narendra Dabholkar, the elderly doctor murdered on Tuesday morning, had never heard of Thomas Aikenhead, the Scottish student — separated as they were by those miles and those years. Before his execution, in his dying statement, Aikenhead wrote: “It is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to the truth, and to seek for it as for hid treasure.”

And if it isn’t, it should be. Long live the ideas and the memory of Dr Dabholkar!