Once and Former Saints, Future Former Saints
Peter A. Kwasniewski (editor), Are Canonizations Infallible? Revisiting a Disputed Question (Arouca Press, 2021), 274 pages. ISBN 9781989905647 paperback, USD$19.95, ISBN 9781989905654 hardcover, USD$26.95.
I have 41 great-aunts, cousins, and a great-great grandmother named Filomena or Philomena, usually changed informally in the vast Italian-American diaspora into Fi, Phyllis, Mamie, or Mae. Her popularity in my family as a patron saint was a product of her canonization in Rome by Pope Gregory XVI in 1837.
Filomena was reputed to have been born in Corfu in 291 and martyred in Rome in 304 at the tender age of 13 (dates and information based on private revelations to an Italian nun). The discovery of a grave in the Catacombs of Priscilla on the Via Salaria Nova in 1802 — itself a wonderful instance of early modern archaeology in the quest for relics— is the source of her cult. A batch of terracotta tiles were found along with a young girl’s bones, and they were arranged to spell the words pax tecum Filumena, or “Peace be with you, Filomena.” Thus began a particularly widespread devotion to a saint immediately believed to be a hitherto-unknown and never-recorded virgin and martyr.
By the 1950s, archeologists had determined that the tiles were originally in the order lumena paxte cumfi — vaguely “may the light be with you,” in an undecipherable construction that may be missing some of its intended components. There was no written evidence for St. Filomena’s existence, let alone her martyrdom, and she was banished from official Roman Catholic liturgical books. On February 14, 1961, the Holy See ordered that the name of Filomena or Philomena be removed from all calendars that mentioned her.
Canonization as an ecclesiastical problem is perhaps an obscure line of questioning — or is it? St. Christopher, St. Valentine, and St. Catherine of Alexandria, among the most beloved of Christian saints for nearly two millennia, share St. Philomena’s fate in being removed from the calendar for lack of historicity. And some canonizations will by their nature always be contested in an ecumenical view: St. Josaphat of Polotsk was canonized for his death while leading tens of thousands of Orthodox Christians into communion with the Roman Catholic Church; St. Alexis Toth of Wilkes-Barre was canonized for leading tens of thousands of followers out of Roman Catholicism and into Orthodoxy. So, too, there is the perennial case of King Charles the Martyr, the only post-Reformation canonization of the Church of England — added to that church’s calendar in 1661 and removed from it by a whim of Queen Victoria in 1859, but with a robust and persistent worldwide cultus among a complex certain mindset of Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox.
The indefatigable scholar and journalist Peter Kwasniewski edits this important collection of essays by twelve prominent Roman Catholic scholars on the broad question of whether the infallible teaching office of the papacy as defined in 1870 applies to canonizations as developed in their current form in the West during the ninth and tenth centuries. The majority of contributors are lay Catholic historians, academics, and attorneys from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Italy, and Chile, joined by one Jesuit priest and one Dominican friar. One is the inimitable Fr. John Hunwicke, sometime Church of England liturgical expert, current priest of one of the Roman Catholic Ordinariates for former Anglicans, and perhaps the final living user of blogger.com.
A motivating factor for the current of thought in which these contributors participate is the extreme increase in canonizations during recent decades. Some nineteenth century popes did not canonize any saints, but the pace picked up after 1900, with 4 under Pope Pius X, 34 under Pope Pius XI, 33 under Pope Pius XII, 84 under Pope Paul VI, 482 under Pope John Paul II, and an astonishing 909 saints canonized or scheduled to be canonized by Pope Francis as of 2022. What is more, recent popes have themselves been canonized with remarkable and unprecedented consistency: Pope Pius X had been canonized in 1954; Pope John Paul II was canonized in 2014; Paul VI was canonized in 2018; John XXIII was canonized in 2014; only Pius XII, with a contested legacy over the Holocaust and German National Socialism, and John Paul I, who ruled for just 33 days, have been excepted from canonization during the lives of most living Christians, and even they too have been raised to the altars as venerabili. It has not gone unsaid that the sheer organizational machinery necessary for this pace of canonizations represents an extraordinary expenditure of finances and attention during a time when the global Church has been beset by serious challenges: clerical abuse scandals, financial irregularities, the grave setbacks of pandemic, the ongoing march of secularism, demands in western Europe for clerical marriage and the ordination of women, and communion for the divorced.
Fr. Jean-François Thomas of the Society of Jesus opens the collection with a careful summary of the “Church Triumphant and the Rules of Canonization Today,” flagging that for a complete inquiry “it would be necessary to take up the whole complex significance of papal infallibility to understand the matter more clearly.” He likewise notes that even by the strictest understanding of canon law, “none of the faithful is obliged to have veneration for all the saints,” and that the modern dialectic of removing and adding saints to the calendar can be understood as a process of “filtration.” American civil rights attorney Christopher Ferrara writes on the “saint factory” evidenced by “rapid-fire canonizations” in recent papacies, registering his personal refusal to accept the canonizations of Paul VI and Oscar Romero, but also investigating the existence of legal conundrums and ambiguities in aspects of the last four papacies.
English Dominican Friar Thomas Crean adds a disputation in proper Thomist form on the question of the infallibility of canonizations, drawing on Aquinas, Suarez, the forgotten canonist Muratori, the current Catechism of the Catholic Church, and nine centuries of conciliar documentation to approach the question. This chapter is especially valuable for its references to sources for further direct inquiry.
For this reviewer, one of the most interesting essays was by American publisher Phillip Campbell on the changed role of the promotor fidei in canonization processes, better known in Latin and English as the “advocatus diaboli” and the “Devil’s Advocate.” A major feature of western Christianity since the sixteenth century, the promotor’s charge was to counter claims of sanctity by arguing that an individual was not a saint, as against the proponents of his or her formal cause. Pope John Paul II essentially removed this position from its formal place in 1983, vitiating a time-honored place for challenge and contestation in Catholic conversation about the nature and definition of holiness. Campbell laments the loss of this office on the grounds that it was a guarantor of scrutiny in “the integrity of the evidence, procedure, or methodology,” which are “all matters of human prudence” (i.e. places where mistakes can be made) in canonization.
It should be emphasized that the contributors to this collection articulate a minority and perhaps even marginalized point of view. The great majority of Roman Catholic theologians do assert that canonization is infallible, and they teach that this is a guiding reason for the deliberate and sometimes centuries-long process between an individual’s death and inscription in the sanctoral calendar.
Some of the authors exhibit an “edge” in their voices tending to express the discomfort of faithful Roman Catholics when the current occupant of the Roman throne does not share their opinions, and at least one reference to “Pope Bergoglio” rather than his correct name Pope Francis is gratuitous. But the longue durée of Church history shows us that it is often the minority voices to which we should listen most carefully, and perhaps especially when they are out of step with curial orthodoxy. This is an essential offering to the ongoing understanding of Christians throughout the world about that wonderful body of persons whom the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops describes as those beloved of God who “lived heroically virtuous lives, offered their life for others, or were martyred for the faith, and who are worthy of imitation.”
