The Inflation of Sanctity: Canonisation, Credibility, and the Crisis of Authority
The recent observation by The Economist that the number of Catholic saints is “climbing heavenwards”¹ is not merely a curiosity of religious culture; it is a symptom—quiet, telling, and profoundly consequential—of a deeper transformation within the Church’s juridical, theological, and pastoral life. The article itself notes not only the numerical expansion of canonisations, but the striking pattern that recent pontiffs are themselves being rapidly elevated to the altars, raising questions about whether canonisation has, in part, assumed a political or institutional function within the post-conciliar Church.
What is at stake, therefore, is not the existence of saints—God forbid—but the Church’s discernment of sanctity, and the credibility of that discernment in an age already marked by doctrinal ambiguity, institutional fragility, and contested authority.
The Classical Doctrine of Canonisation and Its Gravity
In the traditional theological understanding, canonisation is not a mere ecclesiastical honour, nor a symbolic gesture of encouragement. It is a definitive judgment of the Church, bearing a weight that approaches the limits of her teaching authority. St Thomas Aquinas teaches that “the honour which we give to the saints is a certain profession of faith, whereby we believe in their glory,” and thus the Church must not err in such matters.² For to venerate a saint publicly and universally is to assert, implicitly but truly, that this soul is in heaven, conformed perfectly to Christ, and worthy of imitation.
The scholastic tradition develops this insight with rigorous clarity. Francisco Suárez and, most definitively, Prospero Lambertini (Pope Benedict XIV) argue that canonisations pertain to the secondary object of infallibility: not because they define a revealed truth, but because they are so intimately bound up with the Church’s universal worship that error would be intolerable.³ If the Church could err in declaring a saint, she could err in proposing an object of veneration; and if she could err there, the trust of the faithful would be shaken at its root.
Thus, canonisation is not merely about the past life of an individual; it is about the present credibility of the Church.
Even the Fathers, though lacking the later juridical sophistication, display an instinctive caution. St Augustine of Hippo draws a sharp distinction between honour and idolatry: “We honour the martyrs… but we do not build temples to them as to gods.”⁴ Beneath this statement lies a theological discipline: the Church must ensure that those she honours are truly worthy, lest devotion become distortion, and piety slip into error.
The Pre-Conciliar Process: Rigour, Delay, and the Devil’s Advocate
It is precisely because of this doctrinal gravity that the Church, over centuries, constructed a process of extraordinary rigour—one that modern sensibilities, accustomed to speed and efficiency, might find almost excessive. Yet this “excess” was in fact a safeguard of truth.
Under Pope Urban VIII, the Church decisively centralised canonisation procedures, forbidding local cults from developing unchecked and insisting that Rome alone would judge the causes of saints.⁵ This was not bureaucratic control for its own sake; it was a recognition that sanctity, once proposed to the universal Church, must be discerned by the universal Church.
This system reached its fullest expression in the work of Prospero Lambertini (Pope Benedict XIV), whose exhaustive treatise De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonizatione remains unparalleled in its precision. Lambertini did not merely codify procedures; he articulated a philosophy of discernment. Every claim was to be tested; every virtue examined; every miracle scrutinised not only theologically but, where possible, scientifically.
At the heart of this process stood the Promotor Fidei, the “Devil’s Advocate,” whose task was not to assist the cause but to oppose it—to raise objections, expose weaknesses, and force the evidence to withstand the most hostile scrutiny.⁶ The Church, in this structure, institutionalised doubt—not as scepticism, but as a method of arriving at certainty.
The result was a process marked by slowness, sometimes stretching across generations. Yet this slowness was not inefficiency; it was deliberation. Canonisations were rare, and precisely because they were rare, they carried immense weight. When the Church finally declared a saint, it did so with a moral unanimity that left little room for hesitation. The faithful could trust—not sentimentally, but rationally—that the judgment was sound.
The Post-Conciliar Reforms: Acceleration, Simplification—and Convergence with Governance
The reforms introduced following the Second Vatican Council, and codified in 1983 under Pope John Paul II through the Apostolic Constitution Divinus Perfectionis Magister, altered this equilibrium in ways both practical and profound.⁷ The stated intention was pastoral: to highlight the universal call to holiness, to present contemporary models of virtue, and to make the recognition of sanctity more accessible across the global Church.
Yet the structural changes were unmistakable. The adversarial character of the process was softened; the role of the Devil’s Advocate was effectively removed or diminished; the number of required miracles was reduced; and the overall procedure was streamlined, decentralised, and accelerated.⁸
But alongside these procedural reforms, another development has emerged—one noted explicitly in contemporary reporting: the increasing tendency to canonise recent popes themselves, often within historically short timeframes. Pope John Paul II was canonised in 2014, only nine years after his death; Pope Paul VI in 2018; Pope John XXIII likewise in 2014—remarkably, with the usual second miracle dispensed.⁹
This clustering is historically anomalous. For much of the Church’s history, the canonisation of popes was rare and often separated by centuries. Now, the post-conciliar papacy appears increasingly to canonise itself—each successive pontificate affirming its predecessors.
The question arises, therefore, whether canonisation has begun to function, at least in part, as a form of retrospective legitimisation: a means of sacralising a particular ecclesial trajectory, and of placing beyond critique those figures most closely associated with it.
Theological and Ecclesiological Implications
If canonisation is, as the classical theologians hold, an act intimately connected with the Church’s infallibility, then its credibility is inseparable from the integrity—and perceived independence—of the process that precedes it. A process that appears expedited, less adversarial, or intertwined with contemporary ecclesial politics risks introducing not formal error, but practical doubt.
This doubt operates subtly. It does not necessarily deny that any given individual is a saint; rather, it raises the question whether the Church’s judgment carries the same weight it once did. And once that question is admitted, the entire structure of confidence begins to weaken.
This concern is sharpened by the broader context. The post-conciliar Church has experienced a documented decline in Mass attendance, priestly and religious vocations, sacramental practice, and catechetical clarity across much of the Western world. The visible signs of sanctity—asceticism, heroic virtue, doctrinal clarity, sacrificial witness—appear, if anything, less prominent than in earlier ages. To assert, in this context, both a dramatic increase in recognised sanctity and the rapid canonisation of those responsible for the Church’s present direction introduces a tension that cannot easily be resolved.
As St Thomas Aquinas reminds us, sanctity is not measured by visibility or quantity but by the perfection of charity: “The perfection of the Christian life consists chiefly in charity.”¹⁰ It is not produced by ecclesiastical decree; it is discerned by it. If the criteria of discernment are perceived to shift—whether in fact or in appearance—the concept itself risks dilution.
Moreover, when canonisation begins to converge with ecclesial governance—when those who shape the Church’s present are swiftly elevated as models of her past—the distinction between sanctity and policy risks becoming obscured. The saint becomes not only a witness to Christ, but, implicitly, a vindication of a programme.
A Return to Discernment
The Church does not suffer from a surplus of saints; she suffers from a deficit of certainty in recognising them. The pre-conciliar process, for all its severity, embodied a profound theological instinct: that the honour of the altars must correspond to objective reality, and that this correspondence must be demonstrated with the utmost rigour, free from haste, pressure, or institutional interest.
In an age defined by speed, immediacy, and the pressure of relevance, the recovery of slowness is not a luxury but a necessity. The Church must resist the temptation to canonise in order to affirm, to consolidate, or to legitimise. Sanctity is not a tool of governance. It is not a retrospective endorsement of policy. It is the recognition of heroic conformity to Christ.
As Benedict XIV warned, the Church must proceed with circumspection, lest she be deceived—not only by external pressures, but by the subtle temptation to baptise the present.
For sanctity does not belong to the age. It judges the age.
¹ The Economist, “The number of Catholic saints is climbing heavenwards,” 1 April 2026.
² St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 103, a. 3.
³ Francisco Suárez, De Fide, disp. 5; Prospero Lambertini (Pope Benedict XIV), De Servorum Dei Beatificatione, Book I.
⁴ St Augustine of Hippo, City of God, VIII.27.
⁵ Pope Urban VIII, Caelestis Hierusalem Cives (1634).
⁶ Prospero Lambertini (Pope Benedict XIV), De Servorum Dei Beatificatione, passim.
⁷ Pope John Paul II, Divinus Perfectionis Magister (1983).
⁸ Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Normae Servandae in Inquisitionibus (1983).
⁹ Vatican canonisation records; cf. canonisations of Pope John XXIII (2014), Pope John Paul II (2014), Pope Paul VI (2018).
¹⁰ St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 184, a. 3.
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