It may sound like a strange question, given that he was canonized in 2014. But it is one that some people are asking after a Polish television broadcast an investigative report that criticized the late pope for his alleged mishandling of clergy sex abuse cases from 1964-1978 when he was archbishop of Krakow.

Is this enough to call into question John Paul's holiness?

Perhaps we should distinguish between the levels.

After having long denied the importance of sexual abuse in the Church, the Polish bishops are just beginning to take into account the extent of this phenomenon and its systemic character.

We must therefore wait for real judicial, ecclesial and historical work to be carried out.

That Cardinal Karol Wojtyla minimized the seriousness of the events and sent criminal priests from parish to parish in the 1970s is symptomatic of his generation, subject to other elements that might be discovered.

Can a pope be a saint?

In reality, to be a saint does not mean to be perfect or without defects.

Religious history has amply demonstrated this...

But the question remains whether the Polish pope should have been canonized so quickly, without respecting the normal waiting period. And that is for other reasons beyond the way he ran the archdiocese of Krakow.

The question is whether popes should be canonised.

At the very least, the Church should move with caution.

To declare that someone who managed and became the incarnate reality of the Holy See is a saint, necessarily mixes politics - and even ideology - with holiness.

Over the past century, it has become a "fashion" to canonise popes.

Before that, the phenomenon was relatively rare.

Deciding whether or not to canonise a dead pope is always a matter of politics that is linked to his living successor.

Thus, when Pope Francis canonized Paul VI in 2018, he did so to reinforce the message of Vatican II.

Of course, the Church canonizes a person, not a pontificate. And John Paul II was a remarkable personality. But it is still difficult to separate the two, and there are pressure groups in the Vatican that seek to capitalise on the beatification/canonization of this or that pope for reasons that are more political than spiritual.

Manipulation of the sainthood process

More broadly, the trend towards papal canonisations is a sign of both the papacy's increased power since the end of the 19th century, and a more recent lack of confidence in the strength of Catholicism.

The rush to canonise popes is all the more paradoxical since saints were originally proclaimed by popular devotion. And the Vatican has even imposed strict protocols (such as diocesan inquiries, waiting periods, the proof of miracles..) to avoid a manipulation of the sainthood process.

Today, we should probably also look at Catholicism's tradition of declaring saints, but not in order to suppress it.

Having saints is a beautiful heritage of popular Christianity, a way to help the "people" feel more connected to an institution that is sometimes too distant by incarnating it in a form of human proximity.

One is not a saint by what he or she does, but by the qualities of faith that person has manifested.

However, if there is a connection between sexual abuse and holiness, this is undoubtedly where it lies: the crisis we are going through reveals in an acute way the danger of wanting to create "superheroes" in Catholicism according to a faulty understanding of holiness.

We desperately seek out"pastors" and blindly follow "founding fathers", at the risk of losing all critical thinking.

The resulting infantilization has undoubtedly been one of the causes of the phenomena of control that we have discovered in recent years.

So, saints, yes... as long as we remember that this is what we are all called to be!

• Isabelle de Gaulmyn is a senior editor at La Croix and a former Vatican correspondent.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

The report triggered questions about whether John Paul was rushed through the saint-making process, and whether the author of contemporary Catholic teaching on human sexuality didn't understand the complex nature of the topic.

The 450-page report released Tuesday is an unprecedented effort by the church at full transparency, a rare window on internal Vatican decision-making that showed that not only John Paul but also popes Benedict and Francis knew McCarrick had faced multiple accusations.

Each pontiff was aware of different aspects of the accusations against McCarrick, but the initial years of the case came under John Paul's 27-year reign.

John Paul, who died in 2005 and was made a saint in 2014, elevated McCarrick to archbishop of Washington and summarily to cardinal despite the allegations.

Under Benedict, McCarrick was asked to step down as archbishop of Washington when he reached the standard retirement age of 75 and told to keep a lower profile.

Francis assumed his predecessors had already vetted the allegations against McCarrick, but took action once a credible accusation surfaced involving a minor. McCarrick was laicized in 2019.

Reactions to the revelations about John Paul have been emotional and divided.

Some saw a man perhaps naively believing a scheming friend.

The report's authors raised the possibility that John Paul's judgment was heavily coloured by his experience in the Eastern Bloc, where negative propaganda about priests was used to weaken religious organizations. Others felt his decisions were potentially disqualifying for the high moral honour of sainthood.

Vatican's McCarrick report says Pope John Paul II knew of misconduct allegations nearly two decades before cardinal's removal
"Saints are holy, not perfect. There's no chance his canonization would be reversed," said Kathleen Sprows Cummings, head of a centre on U.S. Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, who has written extensively about saints.

She added that if the report had come out before his canonization was complete, it would have mattered. "We canonize people for [Catholics], not for the person themselves. But what we know about sex abuse, this is not the kind of person — a person who failed on this level — he's not to be imitated."

Others felt the report made the case against John Paul's canonization.

"It's almost a bill of particulars against his sainthood," said Jason Berry, an investigative journalist who wrote a book in 2004 about John Paul's failure to address the sexual abuse scandal of Marcial Maciel, a Mexican church leader who abused youth and adults.

"He was unwilling to confront the phenomenon of priests involved in sex crimes. I don't think he thought of it as criminal. He thought of it as a sin, a failing of celibacy," said Berry.

The report showed that John Paul was among many Catholic clerics in the United States and Rome who had heard different pieces of the McCarrick sexual scandal that critics believe should have triggered further investigation. Instead, time after time, church officials, including John Paul, were often reluctant to probe deeper.

The report showed there was a range of allegations swirling around McCarrick starting in the 1980s, but they primarily remained in the United States, with letters sent to various bishops and priests.

By 1999, New York Cardinal John O'Connor wrote a lengthy letter to the Vatican's ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo, describing "grave fears" about what might happen if McCarrick, then the archbishop of Newark, were to receive a promotion.

By the time McCarrick was appointed to lead the D.C. archdiocese, John Paul's assistants had told him that McCarrick would share a bed with seminarians, that anonymous letters accused him of paedophilia with young relatives and that a priest accused him of "attempting to engage in sexual activity," the report said.

The priest was later diagnosed with psychological trauma.

To some readers, those allegations, while serious, didn't add up to a "smoking gun" against McCarrick, who swore on his office to John Paul that the reports were untrue and that he'd never abused or hurt another person. John Paul was guilty only of being too trusting of a man who fooled and charmed Catholics around the globe. Continue reading

Bradburne, whose father was an Anglican clergyman, converted to Catholicism in 1947. His experiences as a soldier in World War II are said to have influenced his conversion.

He initially hoped to become a monk, but in 1969 he visited a neglected leper colony in Zimbabwe.

He decided to stay to help. He remained until 1979 when he was kidnapped and killed by guerrillas during Zimbabwe's civil war. He was 58.

Bradburne's intercession is supposed to have cured a Scottish man who had a brain tumour. He is also reported to have worked miracles before he was killed.

Blood was seen dripping from his coffin at his funeral, although no blood was found inside the casket when it was checked.

Crowdfunders have raised US$28,000 to help with their bid to have a Vatican investigator verify the claims.

Bradburne's niece, Celia Brigstocke, is leading the campaign to beatify her uncle. Others supporting his cause include his publisher, linguistics experts and the man who wrote the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony.

Archbishop Robert Christopher Ndlovu of Harare has petitioned the Holy See for Bradburne's beatification and canonisation.

He is now waiting for a postulator to be appointed to look into Bradburne's life.

Source

• The Week
• Daily Mail
• La Croix
• Image: The Southern Cross

In canonising two popes — Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II — who each represent the progressive and conservative wings, respectively, of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has shrewdly bridged the church's theological schism.

But in his effort to move the church forward, Francis has overlooked women in his calculus.

And one person who was ahead of Pope John Paul II in the queue for canonisation was Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

In October 2003, Pope John Paul II beatified Mother Teresa.

Her legacy reveals not only an untold number of awards received during her lifetime — like the 1971 Pope John XXIII Peace and Nehru Prizes, to name a few — but it also reveals that in addition to the Catholics who revere her there are untold number of Sikh, Muslim and Hindu grass-roots devotees.

"Her life of loving service to the poor has inspired many to follow the same path. Her witness and message are cherished by those of every religion as a sign that God still loves the world today," members of the Missionaries of Charity told the press after Mother Teresa's beatification was announced.

The Missionaries of Charity is the religious order Mother Teresa founded. These nuns, I imagine, like her devotees, are disappointed that Mother Teresa's canonisation is being delayed if not dismissed.

The underlying issue (which no one's talking about openly and forcefully enough) is that Pope Francis has a problem with women.

Its root cause is either personal or ecclesiastical. Or both. Continue reading.

Irene Monroe, from Brooklyn, New York, is a graduate from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and served as a pastor at an African-American church before going to Harvard Divinity School for her doctorate as Ford Fellow.

Source: Huffington Post

Image: APB Speakers International

I do not want this to be the case. Yet, when I think about all the images of consumptive 14-year-old girls that adorned the holy cards of my youth or all the silly stories about saintly young women who would rather die than disobey their parents, I fear it must be so.

I'm sure, of course, that Christ and the holy women those artists gravely misrepresented have forgiven them their sins. But those sins did damage and that damage must be atoned for. Thanks to them, countless Catholics (and non-Catholics too) are running around this world thinking sainthood a boring business and female sainthood more boring still.

For a long time, I was one of those Catholics. Somewhere along the way, between bad religious art and even worse religious storytelling, I picked up the idea that lady saints were like so many of the statues that represented them: cold, untouchable, and decidedly not real. How could they be real? They seemed to have so little life in them, so little blood—never speaking a cross word or giving a cross look, never getting angry, never even thinking a bad thought.

Those plaster women were not like any woman I'd ever met. And they were most definitely not like me, with my red hair and temper and excessively strong opinions. Maybe they were real, I concluded at one point. But they were also the rarest of birds, and neither myself nor anyone I knew could so much as hope to join their ranks.

Then, I met St. Teresa of Avila, who was a giddy flirt, even as a nun, until a mystical encounter with Christ brought her to her knees. When she got back up, she launched a reform of the Carmelite order. Her superiors tried to stop her, but she didn't give up in defeat. Instead, she launched a letter-writing campaign to King Phillip, begging him to intervene. Which he eventually did, bringing the inquisition against her to an end.

Around the same time, I met St. Catherine of Siena, who in 1376, marched off to Avignon and told Pope Gregory to get himself back to Rome post-haste and stay there. He obeyed.

Next I met St. Perpetua, who faced the lions of Carthage more calmly than I can manage to face the field mice in my kitchen. A lot more calmly.

Then, there was St. Joan of Arc, who commanded a motley crew of surrender-happy French soldiers and began her letters to the English army with the salutation, "Dear Heretics." Continue reading

Sources

• Emily Stimpson in Catholic Vote
• Image: Female Saints
  

Emily Stimpson is a freelance writer, based in Steubenville, Ohio.

It discusses the great GKC's particular qualification for this singular honour: his optimism - "no facile cheeriness but a deep conviction that the world was fundamentally good".

This is a significant attribute.

St Teresa of Avila asked God to preserve her "from sad-faced saints" and you only have to look about you to see that there is a lot of gloom and doom about these days to cause existential anxiety and pessimism.

Sometimes I think that Pope Francis has the only cheerful face in the Vatican.

Under-population has overtaken over-population as a future nightmare scenario, alongside the ever-present fears over climate change; there is the power and confidence of Islam compared with the western collapse of Christian belief; the unerring capacity of the new computer technology to tempt us into moral turpitude and so on.

Chesterton would have understood all this - and indeed he predicted some of the factors that have brought about the moral chaos of the western world.

But, as Howse infers, his almost mystical insight into the power of divine love to transform the world saved him from the temptation of gloom.

I learnt from Howse that Chesterton took the name of Francis of Assisi as his confirmation saint, recognising "an ascetic who fasted and did penance not because he hated the world, but because he loved it."

Chesterton was a genius - not itself a requirement of sanctity - a prophet and a great-hearted, large-spirited man.

As William Oddie, GKC's biographer has mentioned in a recent blog, the Bishop of Northampton, the Right Reverend Peter Doyle, in whose diocese Chesterton lived and died, is agreeable for someone to start the process of the writer's cause for canonisation.

Howse reflects that there might be an impediment here: "One cannot help thinking that Chesterton's reliance on his wife had an element of self-infantilisation that was unfair on her...Again, this should not debar Chesterton from heaven. But though saints have their faults - which are not to be imitated - canonising Chesterton would risk his faults being imitated by mistake."

My response to this is to say that Chesterton is inimitable. No-one is going to copy his married life. Continue reading

Image: St Peter's List

No one has to be reminded about the life of Pope John Paul II. He was dramatically on the scene until less than a decade ago. While he was here on Earth, he accomplished wonders as he moved around the planet calling people to faithfulness and the world to peace.

Pope John XXIII had served earlier and his life ended in 1963.

His election was a surprise.

It followed the long reign of Pope Pius XII and most likely the cardinals were looking for someone who would not be in office too long.

There were extraordinary, new forces swirling around our battered planet: Eastern Europe was controlled by the Communists. The so-called Third World was trying to do a balancing act between the United States and its Allies and the Soviet Union.

The Cardinals elected a man who was 77-years-old.

They were right on one thing. It was a short pontificate.

He led the Catholic Church for just five years but he was both a leader and a visionary.

As a young man, Pope John had served as a soldier in the Italian Army in the First World War.

After becoming a priest, he was assigned to the Papal Diplomatic Corps and served in a number of important but difficult spots in the Balkans.

He was Papal Ambassador to France and then was appointed as a Cardinal Archbishop of Venice and then in 1958, he was elected to be the 261 Successor of St. Peter.

The world immediately fell in love with this venerable Holy Pontiff.

He was relaxed, down to earth and mixed easily with every strata of society.

He never forgot his roots. Continue reading

Image: Salt and Light TV

Papal spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said both canonisations could take place before the end of this year, and Vatican journalists are speculating that both pontiffs could be declared saints at the same ceremony, an event that would bring huge crowds to the Vatican.

Church rules for beatification and canonisation ordinarily require the confirmation of two miracles — one before a candidate is beatified and a second subsequent miracle to qualify for canonisation.

But in the case of "Good Pope John", who convened the Second Vatican Council in 1962, Pope Francis used his authority to dispense with the requirement for a second miracle.

The original miracle due to John XXIII's intercession was the cure of an Italian nun with internal bleeding from ulcers, who was close to death after having three-quarters of her stomach and her spleen removed.

The decision to canonise John Paul II — whose funeral in 2005 rang with chants of "Santo Subito!" (Sainthood now!) — will mean his sainthood is recognised a little more than eight years after his death, faster than for any other person in the modern era.

The first miracle attributed to John Paul II concerned the healing of a French nun from Parkinson's disease, an ailment that also affected the late pope.

The second miracle, now accepted by Pope Francis, involved the healing of a Costa Rican woman whose brain aneurysm disappeared after she prayed to John Paul II.

Floribeth Mora told reporters in San Jose, Costa Rica, that her family built an altar to John Paul II outside her house, and while she was watching the late pope's beatification in 2011 she picked up a magazine and, while looking at a photo of the pope, started to hear a voice.

"It said, 'Get up, don't be afraid,'" Mora said. She stood up and felt instantly better, and a variety of medical exams revealed that her aneurysm had simply disappeared.

Mora showed reporters photos of her brain taken before and after the purported miracle.

Sources:

National Catholic Reporter

Associated Press

Benedictus

Image: St Louis Review

What was not expected in today's announcement, which came during a meeting with the prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, was the approval of the canonization of Blessed John XXIII, whose process seemed to have languished in the past few years. Still more surprising was the news that the Pope had waived the standard second miracle. Federico Lombardi, SJ, the papal spokesperson, explained, "Despite the absence of a second miracle, it was the Pope's will that the Sainthood of the great Pope of the Second Vatican Council be recognized." Fr. Lombardi noted that of course the pope has the authority to "dispense" with that requirement, and also added that there had been discussions among theologians and experts about whether two miracles were needed for beatification and canonization. As ever, Pope Francis surprises. (Perhaps John XXIII's second miracle was the election of Francis.)

The two popes appeal to a wide variety of Catholics. John Paul's popularity seemed only to grow as his papacy continued, and has remained strong among Catholics since his death. A man of firm faith, a tireless evangelist, and a strong foe of both communism and poverty, John Paul II became, much as he might dislike the use of the word, a religious rock star. Continue reading

Sources

• America
• Image: Fr Z's blog

The alleged miracle now requires the approval of theologians and then the cardinals and bishops of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, before being submitted to Pope Francis for final approval.

Vatican journalist Andrea Tornielli reports that approval of the miracle could lead to the late Pontiff being canonised as early as October 20.

Continue reading

The Congregation for the Causes of Saints has been examining Romero's cause since 1996.

Bishop Gregorio Rosa Chavez, Auxiliary Bishop of San Salvador, has said he knows Pope Francis personally "and I know he is absolutely convinced that Romero is a saint and a martyr. Everything points to his beatification being on the cards, although we follow God's time frame which is not the same as ours."

Continue reading

St Marianne died in 1918 of kidney and heart disease at age 80. She dedicated 30 years of her life, from 1888 to 1918, helping Hawaiian-born patients suffering with Hansen's disease (leprosy) who were exiled to the Kalaupapa peninsula on the Hawaiian Island of Molokai.

The canonisation ceremony included the presentation of "relics" to Benedict.

Sharon Smith carried one of the bone fragments exhumed from Cope's original grave site in 2005 at Kalaupapa's Bishop Home.

Smith had been wasting away with pancreatitis in 2005 in a Syracuse, N.Y., hospital founded by Cope. A stranger named Sister Michaeleen Cabral pinned a packet of soil from Cope's Kalaupapa grave to Smith's hospital gown and began praying for a miracle.

Smith eventually recovered, and last year the Vatican declared it the second miracle needed to elevate Cope to sainthood.

Click to view 18 photographs

Source

• Vancouver Courier
• Star Advertiser
• Image: CNN

The man would be the first saint to be recognised from South Africa, the weekly asserted.

Benedict Daswa, a businessman and devout Roman Catholic from rural Limpopo, was murdered in February 1990, aged 46, after rejecting claims of the existence of witchcraft in his village, Mbahe, near Thoyohandou.

The miraculous healing was reported in Italy's Panorama weekly yesterday, citing documents sent to the Vatican.

It occurred just weeks after John Paul II's grandiose beatification on May 1 last year, which put him on the path to sainthood just six years after his death and was attended by over a million people.

The second miracle, about which no details were reported, was chosen from among four reported miracles and documented by the promoter of Karol Wojtyla's canonisation, Bishop Slowomir Oder, Panorama said.

A wise life guru like Saint Ignatius of Loyola or an avaricious man, who could not have cared less about the poor - like the rich man in Luke's Gospel? Despite being a Buddhist, Steve Jobs became a central figure in Catholic debate.

He has even caused the Society of Jesus to "bicker" over him. Indeed it is mainly the Jesuits who are fighting over him.

On the one hand there is Fr. Antonio Spadaro, director of the Italian Jesuit magazine "Civilta Cattolica" who poured praise on him in his funeral oration, describing the founder of Apple as a "visionary, a genius, a revolutionary," comparing him to Saint Ignatius of Loyola: "His vision of life and death is very similar to that of the Society of Jesus' founder."

On the other hand are the criticisms made by U.S. Jesuits. Their opinion of Jobs is the complete opposite to Fr. Spadaro's. Through their "America" magazine, they contest Jobs' "consumer legacy", pointing out that Jobs' technological gems are assembled in China, in plants that look like "prison camps, where child labour, epidemics and suicides are rife."

Continue reading Vatican Insider's: Jesuits divided over Steve Jobs

Image: Vatican Insider

The book "Padre Pio: Miracle and Politics in a Secular Age," by Italian historian, Professor Sergio Luzzatto, has discovered documents including a letter from a pharmacist who arranged carbolic acid for Pio.

A report in the Telegraph says Luzzatto suggests that the it was the corrosive acid caused the bleeding on Pio's hands, that the Saint claimed were replicas of Christ.

He also said many Popes had expressed doubts and suggested the Vatican only canonised Pio - real name Francesco Forgione - because of public pressure.

"Human beings - and particularly the most fragile among them - will still need to look at figures such as Padre Pio to get, if not miracles, then at least consolation and hope," Professor Luzzatto said, according the the Sun.

Professor Luzzatto previously referred to the documents, found in the Vatican's archive, in The Other Christ: Padre Pio and 19th Century Italy.

His claims were dismissed by the Catholic Anti-Defamation League in 2007.

Pietro Siffi, the president of the League, said at the time: "We would like to remind Mr Luzzatto that according to Catholic doctrine, canonisation carries with it papal infallibility."

"We would like to suggest to Mr Luzzatto that he dedicates his energies to studying religion properly."

Pio, a former monk who died in 1968 aged 81, wore gloves because his hands bled constantly for 50 years in what were revered as stigmata wounds.

He became Italy's most loved saint after he was canonised by Pope John Paul II in 2002.

Source

• The Telegraph

One of them, Saint Guido Maria Conforti of Parma was born in 1865 and died in 1931. He was afflicted by epilepsy and sleepwalking and, as a result, was rejected by the Jesuit and Salesian orders.

He eventually became a bishop for the Shrine of Our Lady of the Rosary in Fontanellato, Italy. Then, after rising through the hierarchy of the Italian Church with the approval of Popes Pius X and Benedict XV, he founded the Missionary Union of the Clergy.

From St. Peter to Pope Benedict XVI, there have been 265 popes; 78 of them are saints, and Pope John Paul II's beatification brought to 11 the number of popes known as blessed.

With all those holy popes — including the first 35 bishops of Rome — it would seem that the beatification of Pope John Paul could not set any records or be a first of any kind.

Yet his was the quickest beatification since 1588 when the modern sainthood process, regulated by the Vatican, began. Many of the "blessed" popes were beatified on significant anniversaries of their death like Blessed Victor III, who died in 1087 and was beatified in 1887, or Blessed Urban V, who died in 1370 and was beatified in 1870.

Pope John Paul received the recognition six years and 29 days after his death. His process was shorter than the beatification process for Mother Teresa of Kolkata by about two weeks.

Both causes benefitted from a papal exemption from the Vatican rule that five years must pass between a person's death and the opening of his or her sainthood cause.

Pope John Paul set the precedence by waiving the five-year waiting period for Blessed Teresa's cause; Pope Benedict set aside the waiting period for Pope John Paul's cause.

In newspapers, on television and on blogs leading up to the May 1 ceremony, the short time lapse between Pope John Paul's death and his beatification became a topic of debate. The "pro" side generally argued that the late pope's holiness was so clear to so many people that the Vatican had to respond to the "sensus fidelium," the sense of the faithful. The "con" side tended to argue that an acclamation of holiness needs to stand the test of time and six years just isn't enough.

In the causes of both Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul, the Vatican said the waiting period was the only part of the normal process that was skipped. Eyewitnesses — including those with doubts — were interviewed, writings were studied, a massive biography was prepared and the Vatican looked for miracles to confirm that both were in heaven and able to intervene on behalf of the faithful.

Interestingly enough, though, both causes benefitted from some streamlining of the sainthood process ordered by Pope John Paul in 1983. Instead of two miracles for beatification and two more for canonization, he reduced the number of miracles needed to one for each step.

Read more of Pope's not being automatic saints