60 Minutes and the “saint-making machine”
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60 Minutes and the “saint-making machine”

“60 Minutes” did a piece on their show last night on the canonization process, and as they so crudely kept putting it, the Pope’s saint-making machine. They approached the topic from a typically materialist perspective. For one thing, the reporter quizzed the Vatican official on whether the sheer number of new saints canonized by John Paul II “devalued the currency” of sainthood. That’s like asking a mother and father if having four kids instead of one made them love the kids any less, as if there were only a certain amount of total love to be rationed out. The reporter missed the essential point that the Pope has canonized so many people in order to show that saints come in all shapes and sizes and from all places and all walks of life.

I might add that the benefits of modern communications and travel has made it easier for information about holy people to travel back to Rome, which must speed up the process.

Of course, journalists must always find both sides of the story, even if the other side is a tiny minority voice. So the reporter found critics of three recent canonizations causes: Pius IX, Padre Pio, and Mother Teresa.

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