Today i.e. September 4th is going to be a very important day for the Christian fold of our country. You just cannot fathom what the canonization of Mother Teresa will do to “Missionaries of Charity” in terms of getting importance, visibility, validity, growth & expansion, funds and whatnot!

However, before talking about the Sainthood of Mother Teresa, let me explain you the following basics of canonization (the process of declaring a person Saint):

• Who’s a saint?
• What’s the process of canonization?
• What is a miracle?
• What are the rules of the canonization?

Once I have answered these questions, you will have a fair idea of what a Saint is all about. Post that, I will throw some light on the canonizations done in the past by various Popes. Let’s proceed.

The basics of canonization

Who is a Saint?

In the Catholic Church, a “saint” is a person in Heaven. He holds of the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and is therefore believed to be in Heaven by the grace of God.

In Roman Catholic practice, the saints are revered, prayed to, and in some instances, worshiped. In the Bible, saints are called to revere, worship, and pray to God alone.

What’s the process of canonization?

The following are the key steps of the process of canonization. How does a person become a Saint?

1. Servant of God

The process ideally starts at the Diocese level with a Bishop giving permission to open an investigation. Needless to say, it is in responding to a petition by members of the faithful. Typically it starts after a gap of 5 years of the death of the person. However, the Pope has the power to waive off this period (as was done in case of Mother Teresa by Pope John Paul II). To learn more about the person, everything about him/her is dug out – right from his/her grave to the writing, sermons and speeches they made. Basically a complete bio is penned down and the person is labeled “Servant of the God”.

2. Venerable/Heroic in Nature

Consider the first step as filling in the application form and filing of the documents. When the application reaches to Holy See (the body taking care of the entire process), the person becomes a Venerable. Prayer cards get printed and the faithful start looking for a “MIRACLE” wrought by the intercession of this person.

3. Blessed

This is the process of Beatification. Church investigates the miracle and there is a Miracle Commission – comprising of theologians and scientific experts – that investigates the matter. Upon verification of the miracle, the person is declared BLESSED!

4. Saint

After the beatification is done, the Church waits for one more miracle and once that’s found, the person is declared a Saint by the Pope after the ceremony of Canonization. A “Feast Day” is declared in his/her name and the churches are the world can celebrate it. Churches can also be made in hiss/her name.

What are the rules of Canonization?

Role of Church

Originally people were recognized as Saints without any formal process.  As the Church evolved and the Pope became the in-charge of the Catholic world, the process of canonization came into being. It’s a long process and after the middle of 16^th century, Holy See has the sole right to undertake canonization.

Role of Miracles

A miracle is something that our logic, the science and whatever technology we have cannot explain. There are a number of types of miracle like

• Apparitions – wherein Mother Mary (and maybe Jesus) appear in front of a faithful.
• Miraculous Images – here images of Jesus or Mary or both appear. For eg on a tree.
• Stigamta – here a person bleeds a perfumed blood from hands and forehead, resembling the points where Jesus was nailed.
• Medical Miracles – A person recovering from a terminal illness. The recovery is often instantaneous and beyond explanation. These are the most commonly used miracles nowadays.

Earlier there was no requirement of miracles as the proof of people in question being divine. However, now at least 2 miracles are required for sainthood and only 1 miracle is required for beatification of a person. Also, there are witnesses required to validate the miracles.

Role of Devil’s Advocate

The Devil’s Advocate is a Canon Lawyer appointed by Church authorities to argue against the canonization of a candidate. Pope John Paul II reduced the power and changed the role of the office in 1983. This reform changed the canonization process considerably making it easy for them to make someone a saint.

Canonizations done by Popes

S No	Name of the Pope	Papacy lasted  (Days)	Sainthood Awarded	Sainthood granted every ( no. of days)
1	Pope Francis	1249	28	45
2	Pope Benedict XVI	2870	45	64
3	Pope John Paul II	9658	110	88
4	Pope John Pau I	33	NA	NA
5	Pope Paul VI	5521	21	263
6	Pope John XXIII	1678	10	168
7	Pope Pius XII	7156	33	217
8	Pope Pius XI	6209	27	230
9	Pope Benedict XV	2696	4	674
10	Pope Leo XIII	9275	12	773

 

While canonization has been a rather lengthy process taking anything from a decade to over a century to get completed, it is also a very expensive one. There are multiple teams involved who fly in and out of Vatican. They search and document about the person. The miracles verified. Tests after tests are done in case of medical miracles. Once the process gets started, there are various tiers to it as I have already mentioned earlier. There is a cost associated to every single tier and it grows as they move from one tier to another and as new and more people come aboard.

However Pope John Paul II made considerable changes in the process and one such change was trimming the role of Devil’s advocate. Since the 16th Century, when the modern saint-making process began, there have been approximately 300 saints declared. But Pope John Paul II has declared more saints in the 25 years of his papacy than all 264 popes before him combined. His papacy lasted 1249 days and he awarded sainthood to 28 individuals. This means every 45 days, he declared a saint. Compare this to the average of Pope Benedict XV or Pope Leo XIII who took an average of 674 days and 773 days respectively to award sainthood. The pope definitely turned the church into a factory churning out saints. It not only created a debate within the Roman Catholic Church but it also leaves us wondering about the need of this rampant sainthood. What’s with the haste? Are the rules being followed? What happened to The Devil’s Advocate?

Pope John Paul II also did the beatification of Pope Pius IX in the year 2000.Pope Pius IX became internationally infamous when, under his rule (yes he ruled and he also had an army), a Jewish boy named Edgardo Mortara was taken (read abducted) from his family after it was learned he had been secretly baptized by a Catholic maid. The boy got to meet his family only after growing up and becoming a priest.

So before you start scratching your head and the “F” word comes to your mind, let me tell you one more thing – the saints are supposed to e role models for the society at large and for the faithful in particular.

Let a huge WTF come out of your mouth. I’d appreciate it!

Sainthood of Mother Teresa

After Mother Teresa’s death in 1997, the Holy See began the process of beatification and in 2002, the Vatican recognized as a miracle the healing of a tumors in the abdomen of Monica Besra, a woman from Bengal. It was said that the tumour healed after the application of a locket containing Mother Teresa’s picture. Besra said that a beam of light emanated from the picture, curing the cancerous tumour. However, her husband and the doctor said that conventional medical treatment had eradicated the tumors.  Dr. Ranjan Mustafi told The New York Times that the cyst was not cancer at all but a cyst caused by tuberculosis. It was not a miracle. She took medicines for nine months to one year. As per Besra’s husband, she was cured by the doctors and not by any miracle.

Furthermore, it was said that Besra’s medical records, which contained sonograms, prescriptions, and physicians’ notes, were being withheld by Sister Betta of the Missionaries of Charity. The officials at the Balurghat Hospital where Besra was seeking medical treatment claimed that they were being pressured by the Catholic order to declare the cure a miracle.

Vatican officials responded by saying that the charges were investigated by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and that they found no obstacle to Mother Teresa’s beatification. Mother Teresa was beatified 19 October 2003, thereby bestowing on her the title “BLESSED”.

Isn’t that cool and just? We thought that she was our Mother. However, it turns out she was their servant. We have been nothing but people living in dark.

Other criticism of Mother Teresa

Journalist Christopher Hitchens has been a constant critic of Mother Teresa. In his book has argued that “her intention was not to help people”. Further, he alleged that she lied to donors about the use of their contributions. “It was by talking to her that I discovered, and she assured me, that she wasn’t working to alleviate poverty”, says Hitchens. “She was working to expand the number of Catholics. She said, ‘I’m not a social worker. I don’t do it for this reason. I do it for Christ. I do it for the church.”

Researchers at the University of Montreal and the University of Ottawa, who concluded in a 2013 report that the nun did not deserve the saintly reputation she had acquired over her lifetime due to her “rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce”.

Mother Teresa encouraged members of her order to secretly baptize dying patients. The Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a ‘ticket to heaven’. An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend that she was just cooling the patient’s head with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him.

The patients who came there for medical help didn’t always get what they should have. The needles were washed with warm water and weren’t properly sterilized. There were no painkillers. There were no separate wards for patients with TB.

What’s actually going on?

Religions, not just the church, are facing a tough time right now. With probably the only exception of Islam, the people are becoming more and more detached from religion – if not becoming atheists. The church has never been this weak in the Europe. Even the conservative countries like Russia are looking beyond churches. Retaining the glory is becoming difficult, let alone the expansion.

Even if I talk about the expansion plans of church, the Islamic world is a very tough territory. They were present in Afghanistan decades before Osama and Taliban took over but they couldn’t build a platform. The sizable Pakistani Christian community came into being from conversions of low-caste Hindus. The church is yet to build inroads into the Muslim community there. They already have chunks of the southern half of Africa. Where do they go now? Orient? Yeah! India? Hell yeah! Nepal after earthquake? Hallelujah!

Al these saints are a bridge. They have a strong local presence and certificate declaring their presence in Heaven right next (well, almost) to the God just strengthens that bridge. A bridge that will take the masses to the God. Teresa is going to be the bridge. A new and broader bridge, which will let scores of Vatican’s servants enter the nation.

It’s a brand new marketing strategy that will pack the Vatican’s offerings in the Indianized package. The package that has image of a sari clad “Indian” saint who worked for the cause of Christianity humanity.

God be our savior! Amen.

PS: I am not trying to belittling her work. I just cannot think of a person who could have done so much of service to the poor. She indeed took care of a lot of orphans, patients and homeless. But she didn’t do  it for the sake of humanity. She had a purpose and that purpose was Christ. So, she isn’t my saint. Not the mother, either.