Pope Francis has created
a new path to sainthood
Laying down one’s life for others is now a category under which a person might be beatified or canonized
by Stephen Bullivant
CATHOLIC HERALD
Wednesday, 12 Jul 2017
In an even-more-than-usually frenetic week of Vatican news (or rather, in some cases, alleged news), one might easily have missed an announcement of real significance.
Yesterday, the Holy Father released an Apostolic Letter motu proprio (“on his own authority”). These tend to be short, technical documents. They’re often used to tinker with the wording of Canon Law, or to amend the statutes of some body or other. But they can occasionally be of wide-reaching importance.
Summorum Pontificum, for instance, was promulgated motu proprio.
In yesterday’s, Pope Francis created a new category under which a person might be beatified/canonised: laying down one’s life for others.
This is now the fourth in what, until the day before yesterday, was a long-established list of three: i) martyrdom; ii) a life of heroic virtue; or iii) having already a widespread, longstanding reputation of holiness. (This last one tends to be used sparingly, and only in exceptional cases. That said, each of the last three popes has used it to honour – one assumes – personal favourites: Kinga of Poland; Hildegard of Bingen; Peter Faber, Angela of Foligno).
Francis’s fourth category is explicitly justified with reference to Christ’s assertion that – in the KJV’s classic phraseology – “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”
(John 15.13). Indeed the document’s formal title
Maiorem hac Dilectionem is, of course, taken from the Latin version of that verse (albeit rather mangling its meaning, with the traditional three-word rule.)
Following this opening quotation, Francis writes:
Worthy of special consideration and honour are those Christians who, following the footsteps and teachings of the Lord Jesus, have freely and voluntarily offered their life for others, and have persevered until death in this”. Since such heroic offering of life evinces a true, full, and exemplary imitation of Christ it warrants the admiration which the Christian community customarily reserves for martyrs and those having lived a life of heroic virtue.
Now there are, I think, two possible ways of interpreting this.
The first is to see this as a radical shake-up of what “counts” as authentic holiness, opening up the possibility of sainthood to those who die not just for Christ (i.e., traditional martyrs), but to those who die helping others. This interpretation fits more-or-less neatly into several media tropes surrounding this pontificate. Naturally enough, it raises questions as to whether the change has been made with specific people “in mind”. Media reports speculate that, for example, AIDS workers dying of Ebola might count under this new rubric.
[Oh, the possibilities are endless, in fact. Anyone killed under any circumstances while carrying out an act to help other people - for instance, by a madman, or struck down by a vehicle, while in the act of bringing food to a sick person, or even helping a cripple cross the street . And so, theoretically, in a reductio ad absurdum, we could have victims of violence, pizza delivery persons, school crossing guards and the like in a long queue to be beatified.
There are very good reasons why the Church has been stringent about her 'requirements' for canonization, and Bergoglio’s new motu proprio is yet another means by which he is loosening canonical discipline for an ostensibly ‘good’ reason. It is yet another indication of his tendency for ostentatiously profligate indiscrimination in many of his decisions.
Will he next amend the existing rules for canonization to do away with any examination of the candidate saint’s previous acts and statements if he were someone who simply died while doing a ‘good deed for others’ – whereas those who ‘merely’ led lives of heroic virtue have to be super-scrutinized?
The Church has surely produced countless unrecognized, uncanonized saints in two millennia but if their saintliness in life was never striking enough or widely known enough to have been reported at all, then the great majority of them were probably good persons whose lives either earned them immediate passage to Heaven or a spell in Purgatory, and are, yes, unrecognized saints, since everyone who goes to Heaven belongs to the 'communion of saints'.]
The second is to see it, more mundanely, simply as a codification of previous precedent – a kind of administrative tying-up of loose ends. For, in fact, the Church already proclaims the sanctity of some who, incarnating John 15.13, have willingly sacrificed their own life in order to save that of others.
The most striking example here is St Maximilian Kolbe, whose voluntary death at Auschwitz in place of another prisoner will surely be familiar. One also thinks here of, say, St Damien of Molokai, who died of the same disease – leprosy – of those he dedicated his life to serving.
In neither case, it will readily be admitted, is the manner of their deaths somehow incidental to how we view each man’s sanctity. Don’t get me wrong: both led lives of heroic virtue, and might feasibly have been canonised on those grounds alone. Nevertheless,
I doubt I’m alone in thinking that there is something specifically “saintworthy” [If Mr Bullivant is not alone, then he and those who think like him must be a very decided minority among Catholics who have even questioned that Kolbe or Damien deserved to canonized] in each man’s decisive willingness to die – a spur-of-the-moment impulse for St Maximilian; a foreseeable “occupational hazard” of a lifelong commitment for St Damien – over and above the rest of their biographies.
In the case of Kolbe, at least, Popes Paul VI and John Paul II – both of whom knew a fair bit about true sanctity – seem strongly to have agreed. Famously, they beatified and canonised him respectively as a martyr. As St John Paul put it, “In this human death, there was the clear witness given to Christ: the witness given in Christ to the dignity of man, and the sanctity of his life, and to the salvific power of death, in which power of love manifests itself”.
St Maximilian was duly canonised in Pope Paul’s coinage – a “martyr of love” (or “charity”): an exception created for a truly exceptional individual.
The trouble with exceptions, though, is that they set precedents. If Kolbe’s dying-for-others was a radical instance of the imitatio Christi then – again to quote his Polish fellow-saint (albeit slightly out of context) – “But was Father Maximilian Kolbe the only one?”
[No, he was not. But if other similar exemplary lives come up – similar not only in the conscious decision to die willingly for others but also in a life of heroic virtue that can be proven in a cause for canonization as St. Maximilian’s could well be – then by all means, let a cause for canonization be presented in their behalf!]
My hunch is that yesterday’s motu proprio was not necessarily so radical an act as it might seem. The existing quasi-category of “martyr of love” – which rightly recognizes a truly Christlike death, but nevertheless sits awkwardly as a species of martyrdom (on any traditional understanding) – is admittedly unsatisfactory. The creation of a dedicated “offering up one’s life for others” category is much, much neater.
I’m not a gambling man, thank God, but I’d tempted to wager that it is precisely this that lies behind the new ruling. A close reading of the text itself (currently available only in Latin and Italian) suggests it is a rubberstamping of an idea that’s been working its way through the Congregation for the Causes of Saints’ committees for some time. (There is mention of a Plenary Session last September, for example.)
The document is, moreover, careful to distinguish this new category from martyrdom proper. There are, for example, no water-muddying mentions of “martyrs of charity”, or anything close. No mention, either, of St Maximilian himself – which, given that he is the most obvious exemplar of the kind of death the document seems to have in mind (to the point, indeed, of “Greater love hath no man” being the very text John Paul II preached on at his canonization), would otherwise be a remarkable omission.
A significant news story, to be sure. But
not, I think, the groundbreakingly novel one it might at first seem to be. [That’s because Bullivant seems unable to see it the not-unfounded and not-unreasonable way I do – that this is yet another indication of Bergoglio’s tendency for ostentatiously profligate indiscrimination, even in matters of canonical discipline. His motto seems to be “Open as many doors as I can to make everything as nice and easy as possible for Catholics and liberate them from any and all of the old disciplines”.
Meanwhile, prepare yourself for hundreds if not thousands of new candidate saints from Latin America - all those who were ever killed in the many violent conflicts that have afflicted that continent since the end of the Second World War. The numbers of the new 'saints who willingly gave their lives' will far exceed the martyrs of the Spanish and Mexican civil wars combined.
All the proof necessary, it would seem, is their names on a list of confirmed dead from conflicts with government forces (representing evil, always, and whose dead in the same conflicts can surely not be considered potential saints in any way). Oh, add to those numbers the perhaps astronomical numbers of Africans who have died in similar conflicts. How can Bergoglio overlook them if he starts canonizing Latin Americans by the thousands? The reductio is beyond absurdum.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/07/2017 19:16]