From Catholic News Service

Pope wants greater selectiveness  in picking saint candidates

By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Catholic Church should be more selective and very rigorous in choosing candidates for sainthood, Pope Benedict XVI said in a message to the Congregation for Saints' Causes.

The Pope, who as a cardinal expressed concern over the number of causes being promoted, wrote to the congregation as its members met April 24-26 for a plenary assembly.

Congregation members discussed a new instruction for the initial diocesan stages of the sainthood process and were looking at possible changes to the formal criteria for determining martyrdom and for miracles.

Pope Benedict told the congregation that from the moment of his election a year ago, he had put into effect changes that met the "widespread hope" that the difference between beatification and canonization would be underlined and that local churches would be more involved in the entire process.

Modern men and women need true models of holiness, he said, and they must be chosen with care.

First, the Pope said, further instructions are needed to help local bishops "safeguard the seriousness of the investigations that take place in the diocesan inquiry" into a candidate's martyrdom or the person's Christian virtues and miracles attributed to his or her intercession.

Second, he said, there must be a real "fame of holiness" and not just a conviction among a small group of people that the person in question was a good Christian.

Although he did not refer specifically to any individual, the Pope said that a spontaneous and widespread recognition of sainthood, as occurred in the case of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, "is a sign from God that indicates to the church those who deserve to be placed upon the candelabra to give 'light to all those in the home.'"

On the question of miracles, Pope Benedict appeared to rule out a change that some theologians had hoped would leave space for consideration of "moral miracles," such as dramatic conversions that occur when a notorious sinner turns his or her life around after coming into contact with the writings of a candidate for sainthood.

"The uninterrupted practice of the church establishes the necessity of a physical miracle," he said. "A moral miracle is not enough."

"In addition to reassuring us that the servant of God lives in heaven in communion with God, miracles are the divine confirmation of the judgment expressed by church authorities about the virtuous life" lived by the candidate, he said.

The congregation's plenary also included a discussion of the definition of martyrdom, a debate that has been going on for at least 30 years.

The traditional definition of a martyr is someone who was killed out of hatred for the faith.

But, for example, Conventual Franciscan Father Maximilian Kolbe was canonized in 1982 as a martyr even though the Nazis at the Auschwitz death camp did not kill him explicitly because of his faith. When a prisoner escaped from the death camp, Nazi officials announced 10 would die in his place. One of the 10 chosen was a Polish army sergeant who asked to be spared because he had a wife and children.

Father Kolbe stepped forward and asked the camp commandant to let him replace the man. The commandant agreed, and Father Kolbe and the other nine were locked up in a bunker to starve to death. When guards entered the bunker to remove the bodies, Father Kolbe was still alive. They killed him with an injection of carbolic acid.

Pope Benedict told congregation members that while the strength of the faith of martyrs has remained unchanged, "the cultural contexts of martyrdom and the strategies on the part of the persecutors" have changed.

In most cases, he said, modern persecutors attempt to hide their hatred of the Christian faith and Christian virtues, claiming to act, for example, in defense of "political or social" ideologies.

The determination over what constitutes martyrdom is one of the questions involved in the ongoing process for the canonization of Archbishop Oscar A. Romero of San Salvador, who was shot as he celebrated Mass.

Opponents have argued that he was killed for his political stance; supporters have said his pronouncements about social and political matters were motivated solely by his faith-based conviction about human dignity and the demands of justice.

Pope Benedict said a person could not be declared a martyr without "irrefutable proof" of the victim's willingness to die for the faith and without "moral certainty" that the persecutor's action stemmed "directly or indirectly" from a hatred of the faith.

"The martyrs of yesterday and of our time gave their lives freely and knowingly in a supreme act of charity to witness to their fidelity to Christ, to the Gospel and to the church," the Pope said.

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