John Paul is already on the road to sainthood; his beatification takes place on Sunday. It is a move that has caused a mixed reaction. But everybody needs heroes and John Paul, as the response to his death demonstrated, is an inspiration and role model for millions of people. He is a holy hero.
During his pontificate John Paul changed the Catholic Church’s understanding of what it means to be a saint. He named 482 saints — more than the number declared during the combined papacies of the past 500 years. He thought everybody needs heroes. Critics complained that John Paul had watered down what was supposed to be an exhaustive, exclusive system of gauging saintliness, and that he turned the Vatican into “a saint factory.”
There is a danger that mere celebrities are confused with heroes. But the Catholic Church still has a robust process in place for recognising authentic sanctity. The changes John Paul introduced were designed however to move the emphasis from perceiving saints as impossibly perfect plaster cast images towards seeing them as real people who by an heroic effort become holy. He wanted Saints to be not just objects of veneration but role models and sources of encouragement and inspiration for ordinary people. He believed that the more the people of the Church could see specific, local examples of lives lived in heroic virtue the more likely they are to try to live good and holy lives themselves. John Paul II’s beatifications and canonizations were very much part of his “new evangelization”.
It is these changes that have made his own rapid progress towards sainthood possible. He re-wrote the 350 year old procedure from a judicial to an academic historical process. He cut the number of miracles required for a canonization from four to two and eliminated the role of the “Devil’s Advocate”, the Vatican official assigned to raise questions about a candidate’s virtues as well as about any alleged miracles said to have occurred in the would-be saint’s name. He also somewhat decentralised the process, leaving some of the early stages in the hands of the local Bishop.
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