The Vatican has codified the new norms for beatification, most notably, as has already been put into practice, that Pope Benedict will not preside at beatifications. In the past, a pope only presided at canonizations, not beatifications, to maintain the distinction between the two states. Beatification raises a deceased as an example for veneration on a local level, while canonization raises them for universal veneration, or at least that’s how in worked in days before instant global communication. Canonization is also an action of papal infallibility, whereas beatification is not.
Pope John Paul often presided at beatifications and it is well known that he raised more saints to the altars than all of his predecessors of the last millennium combined. It looks Pope Benedict is returning to the more sedate, considered pace of the past. We need time to assimilate all these new saints. We don’t want to give any of them short shrift.
Dom, is CWN down? The link doesn’t work and I haven’t been able to access CWN directly either…
It’s working for me right now. Maybe it was a temporary interruption.
Still not getting through. AOL comes back with “Website found. Waiting for reply” but never gets beyond that. This has been going on since Sunday.
I sent a note to the newsletter mailbox but I don’t know if that is set up for incoming mail. I haven’t changed anything at this end…
I’m told they were undergoing some kind of Denial of Service attack, and that the site has been up and down since the weekend. Additionally, AOL doesn’t directly serve sites, but serves up cached pages, so maybe their cache isn’t replenished.
You might try different addresses such [url=http://www.catholicworldnews.com]http://www.catholicworldnews.com[/url] or cwnews.com without the www
Thanks Dom – the alternate address did it!