Papal saints: Once a given, now extremely rare

 ON Sunday, Popes John Paul II and John XXIII became the 79th and 80th heads of the Roman Catholic Church to become saints, an event that has become a rarity in modern times.

Roughly 30 per cent of all popes are saints. Starting with St Peter, traditionally regarded as the first leader of the church after Christ’s death, 52 of the first 55 popes became saints during Catholicism’s first 500 years. 

In the past 1000 years, just seven popes have been made saints, including the two canonised on Sunday. It will be the first time in the 2000-year history of the church that two popes will be declared saints at one time.

John Paul II died on April 2, 2005, and the hundreds of thousands packing St Peter’s Square chanted “Santo, subito!” or “Sainthood, now!” in Italian on the day of his funeral. Pope Benedict XVI soon waived the five-year waiting period after a person’s death and officially began the canonisation process for his predecessor. (John Paul himself had shortened the waiting period to five years from the traditional 50.)

Nine years later – a lightning flash in Vatican time – John Paul II will be made a saint. To put that in perspective, since 1588, when the Catholic Church created an office called the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the average time between the death of an eventual saint and canonisation is 181 years.

Non-papal saints outnumber canonised pon­tiffs, of course. Officially, the Catholic Church teaches that all people in heaven are saints, but some are officially “canonised,” or recognised as having lived lives of heroic Christian virtue and are worthy of imitation. 

During the church’s first 1000 years, saints were proclaimed by popular demand. As a result, it’s impossible to quantify exactly how many saints there are, but some estimates have the number exceeding 10,000.

In 993, St Ulrich of Augsburg was the first saint to be formally canonised, by Pope John XV. By the 12th century, the church officially centralised the process, putting the pope himself in charge of commissions that investigated and documented potential saints’ lives. 

And in 1243, Pope Gregory IX asserted that only a pope had the authority to declare someone a saint. – PewResearchCentre