Saint

For the first Christian centuries nobody made saints, because there was no procedure to make them with. A martyr was buried, the community kept the anniversary, and the bishop either permitted the gathering or did not. Peter Brown's account of the late antique cult describes a practice organised around graves and around the patronage a dead friend of God was believed to exercise for the living, and it grew from below rather than being conferred from above. Bishops regulated what was already happening in their own dioceses, and cults spread by travel, by relics moving, and by imitation.

The shift to a papal decision was slow and never as clean as later summaries suggest. The canonisation of Ulrich of Augsburg by John XV in 993 is the case usually cited as the first performed by a pope, but it did not stop anybody else performing them. In 1170 Alexander III wrote to a Swedish king that no one was to be venerated as a saint without the authority of the Roman church, and that letter entered the collection of decretals Gregory IX promulgated in 1234, which is the point at which reservation to the papacy became ordinary law. Andre Vauchez's study of the medieval causes shows what changed in practice: the inquiry acquired procedure, witnesses, notaries and a written record, and the question moved from whether a cult existed to whether the life and the miracles could be proved.

The machinery has been rebuilt repeatedly since. Sixtus V created the Congregation of Rites in 1588 to run it, the 1917 code of canon law absorbed it, and Paul VI separated the causes into their own congregation in 1969.

The process that runs today was set out by John Paul II in the apostolic constitution Divinus Perfectionis Magister of 1983, and it moves a candidate through named stages. A cause opens in the diocese where the person died, and the candidate is a Servant of God while that inquiry gathers evidence and every written word attributable to the person is examined. When the Congregation accepts that the person practised virtue to a heroic degree, or died a martyr, the pope declares them Venerable. Beatification normally follows on a miracle attributed to their intercession, and permits public veneration in a defined place or community; martyrdom dispenses with that first miracle. Canonisation, which extends veneration to the whole church, normally requires a second.

The miracle requirement is where the process does its most unusual work, because the claim examined is almost always a medical one. The Congregation refers alleged healings to a board of physicians, the Consulta Medica, whose members are asked a question that is deliberately narrower than the theological one: whether the recovery can be explained by the medicine of the day, given the diagnosis, the treatment and the course. A finding that it cannot is not a finding that God acted. That second judgement is made afterwards, by theologians and then by the pope.

The 1983 reform also changed the shape of the argument. The office of Promoter of the Faith, whose holder was popularly called the devil's advocate because his job was to attack the case, was reduced to a promoter of justice presiding over the discussion. Kenneth Woodward's reporting on the congregation in the 1980s records the complaint that followed, that removing an adversary from the procedure made causes easier to win.