The diocesan phase of the cause for the beatification of his mother Jorja Perea, was opened in July Read more

With the exception, of course, of the British monarchy.

Evidence of such mastery of panoply and sacred theatre has been in abundance these past weeks, culminating with the funeral of the Queen.

And there will be more to come with the formal coronation of Charles at some future date.

There is another parallel between the Vatican and the British Crown that is both arrestingly relevant and wildly provocative at the moment, and that is canonisation or sainting.

The world watched the requiem for Pope John Paul II and marvelled at the breadth of his popularity.

That popularity rose to fever-pitch as his coffin was led from the Piazza di San Pietro into the Basilica when calls erupted from the huge crowd for "santo subito" - to proclaim him a saint immediately by way of acclamation.

It didn't quite happen that way, but the saint-makers in the Vatican took note.

The situation isn't exactly the same at the Queen's funeral, although the emotional intensity, the feeling of loss and the impulse to veneration, are easily comparable to that accorded John Paul II.

The sainting of the Queen is not outside the realm of possibility.

Queen Elizabeth was Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith - a key fixture in the religious establishment of the land.

She knows what it is to be an Anglican.

And Anglicanism does have a place for saints, although its history regarding "saint craft" and relics is a fraught one.

As always, Anglicanism found the middle road between an outright abhorrence of anything to do with saints on the one hand and a replication of the Roman system of invoking saints on the other.

It created its own criteria: Miracles would not be a requirement, a complex sainting process would not be necessary, and honouring the saints would be a devotional option without the force of law and tradition.

A casual glance at the names included in the Anglican Common Worship Calendar of 2000 reveals an inclusive mosaic of holy ones - those in the words of Anglican scholar Kathleen Jones "whose lives had the merit of personalising theology - bringing the great issues of Christian living down to the human level, and providing models for others to follow."

Queen Elizabeth certainly fulfils that rubric.

The problem with sainting is the general public misperception about what holiness actually means.

Elevation to a status of perfection it is not.

Rather, it connotes personal integration, authenticity and integrity. It means placing the needs of others and the demands of office above one's own preferences and priorities, and in the Christian tradition, it means, as the Queen herself said in her Christmas 2000 address: "For me, the teachings of Christ, and my own personal accountability before God, provide a framework in which I try to live my life."

Her vocation as Queen requires sacrifice, and sacrifice is duty lived fully and unrelentingly.

As a Globe editorial phrased it: "In a world of charlatans and fakers and self-actualising hypocrites...she was the real deal."

To be the "real deal" is a mark of her exceptionality as a human being, a sign of her "heroicity of virtue" as the Roman Catholic saint-trackers dub it. It means that your life as a witness to the truths and commitments that define you is a life of unwavering fidelity. Continue reading

• Michael W. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at St. Michael's College. He wrote and narrated the CBC Ideas series Stalking the Holy: the Politics of Saint-making.

A first miracle would see her named as "Blessed", and a second would mean her being named a saint.

The sisters of Compassion property in Island Bay has been developed in the expectation of attracting thousands of visitors to Wellington.

When Suzanne Aubert died in 1926, she was buried at Karori cemetery in Wellington.

She was moved to Our Lady's Home of Compassion in 1950 and placed in a grave at the foot of a Pietà.

In 1984, both the grave and the statue were transferred to different sites on the grounds after the buildings at Island Bay were replaced.

Earlier this year Aubert was moved to a newly prepared crypt with the Pietà just outside the main window.

The recognition of a miracle requires reports, citations of witnesses, a biography, medical records and medical studies of people cured.

Last week, Sisters of Compassion archivist Josephine Gorman said she could not elaborate on the cures performed by Aubert in 1940s that were considered potential miracles at the time, as the privacy of those people was important.

The sisters would have to collect medical evidence to ensure there had been no medical intervention required, she said.

If doctors in New Zealand found there was no medical explanation, it would be sent to Rome for Vatican doctors to find out if the alleged cure was a miracle.

A spokeswoman for the New Zealand Catholic Church said more than one doctor was required to verify and provide proof of a miracle cure.

"Proof of a cure must be evidenced by medical records, professional diagnoses of medical doctors and their testimony, x-rays, pathological reports, CAT scans etc," she said.

Source

• Stuff
• Stuff
• Suzanne Aubert
• Image: Stuff

Mother Teresa of Calcutta - that's what it was called when she lived there but let's call it Kolkata to bring the city's name up to the present - was canonized by the Pope last weekend. The media around the world found their way to the woman "cured" of her tumor, a cure that was the first of the two miracles attributed to her intercession.

Well some do take exception to the miraculous and with good reason. The saint making process entails something offensive to post-Enlightenment ears: miracles. The mere mention of the word evokes goose bumps born of a hostility to clerical claptrap, to anti-scientific superstition or to Protestant fear of a manipulation of the Divine.

For starters, let's clear out some shibboleths.

First, sometimes (as with the recent canonization of the beloved Pope John XXIII who convened Vatican II), the miracle requirement is simply dispensed with. It's not an absolute requirement for canonization. Heroic virtue and faith are. The requirement of miracles is a late development in the process.

When Christianity was confined to the hub of Europe and Orthodoxy to the Middle East, most saints were local products - acclaimed by the locals of a diocese and declared to be saints by the local bishop.

As Christianity spread, the challenge of quality control took over and so, for Western Christians, the declaration of saintliness had to come with papal approval. And that required compliance with a stringent process of investigation of the candidate's life, writings and deeds.

As Catholicism spread beyond its confines, the challenges intensified because local agitators, for whatever reason, advocated less than worthy candidates. So, the process became bureaucratized and we have the current procedures.

Now to the nub of the affront to modern sensibility. The miracle chase smacks of animism, superstition and trickery to a 21st Century mind. The scientific revolution provides a process for the examination, experimentation and treatment of data that leads to a rational and demonstrable conclusion.

When examining a miraculous event, what do the Church's investigators ask?

The simple requirement is that there is no known rational, scientific or medical explanation for the transformation in the patient's condition. It's a negative requirement, not a positive assertion.

And there are enough smart Catholics around - even in the Vatican where this is a ready concession - to acknowledge that today's miracle might well be tomorrow's scientifically explainable commonplace.

I learnt this fact about the approach to miracles because I knew the GP who attended the woman whose cure was the first "miracle" attributed to Australia's first Saint, Mary MacKillop. He was also our family's GP.

His patient was still alive when Mary was canonized some 45 years after the cure. Dr. Jim L'Estrange had referred her to all the best specialists in Sydney and the conclusion had been reached that the patient's cancer was inoperable and incurable.

Good night nurse.

Then when the long investigation of the "cause" (as it's called) for Mary MacKillop was underway, the doctors were all interviewed. All they could say to the main investigator, Fr. Paul Gardiner, was "she was ill and dying, we couldn't do any more and she recovered when the tumors disappeared".

This is no rowdy declaration of the miraculous. It's a modest account of something the best of medical science at the time could not explain. It has never been a "God of the gaps" claim. Simply a humble admission that something has happened that does not have a scientific explanation yet.

But there's a deeper problem that this saint making and "miracle" recognition creates for us moderns. 19th Century scientific positivism creates the expectation that everything has a scientific explanation and only obscurantists will deny that.

Its mirror image is the claim to infallibility made by Pope Pius IX in 1870. That was a joust that amounted to saying "You think your scientific method is infallible. Well I've got an infallibility that has divine warrant!" It was a clash of absolutists trying to out do eachother.

And both sides missed what lovers, poets and sufferers know a lot about: mystery.

• Michael Kelly SJ is a Jesuit priest, journalist and the executive director of UCA News. Published in John Menadue - Pearls and Irritations. Republished with the author's permission.

And Auckland Bishop Patrick Dunn will lead commemorations as part of the 11am mass on Sunday at St Patrick's Cathedral.

More than a thousand people are expected to attend the Auckland Sunday morning commemoration.

People of many faiths are expected to attend including representatives from the Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic faiths.

The five Auckland-based nuns of Mother Teresa's Order, The Missionaries of Charity will also be there.

An inter-faith committee (see below) is also planning an event in November at St Paul's College in Ponsonby to celebrate her sainthood.

"Her work of loving service and care for the poorest of the poor in India knew no religious or cultural boundaries, and people of the world's great faiths honour her as one of their own," said Lyndsay Freer, spokeswoman for the Auckland Catholic Diocese.

"This has been evident in Auckland, when six years ago a unique inter-faith committee was formed by people of several faiths to arrange an annual event to commemorate Mother Teresa's legacy of service to the poor in India."

Mother Teresa visited New Zealand in 1973, where she was met in Wellington by the then Prime Minister Norman Kirk and Leader of the Opposition Jack Marshall.

In Auckland, she attended and spoke at a rally at Alexandra Park."

Source

• nzherald.co.nz
• aucklandcatholic.org.nz
• Image: ethniccommunities.govt.nz

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.

Sources

The two-month March course is bringing together 80 students from around the world to train them in the skills needed to advance the cause of their potential saint. Patience, attention to detail and being prepared to commit to what might be decades of work, are skills and attitudes required by "Postulators".

The Congregation for the Cause for Saints runs the course to meet the demand and "because it's the only entity that can teach both the theory and the practice," Archbishop Marcello Bartolucci, secretary of the Congregation said.

Sainthood is a two-stage process, beatification, then canonisation as a saint. Except in the case of martyrs, one miracle is needed before a person can be beatified and then another before a person is canonised.

Dr Patrizio Polisca, head of the Congregation's medical commission says the commission makes no judgement about miracles. "Miracles are a theological judgement", he said.

"The only thing a scientist can say is that a healing does or does not have a biological explanation."

The Congregation requires a person to have completed the course before being certified as a Postulator.

Sources
Catholic News Service
Times of India
Wikipedia
Image: ABC Religion and Ethics