It appears that good Pope Benedict is in an unseemly rush to sanctify his predecessor. For the non-Catholics among you, I will explain first that the Catholic Church has appointed itself God’s master, so to speak, in that it can declare a person a saint. Many a sinner has apparently entered heaven that way. The process is rigorous. One must perform one miracle from beyond the grave to be beatified, three for full sainthood. That being done, and so declared by God’s vicar here on earth, it is bound in heaven. Apparently there were lots of candidates for miraculous intervention by the Polish Pope, but this one won the laurels:
Church-appointed investigators concluded that a French nun was miraculously cured of Parkinson’s disease after praying to John Paul within weeks of his death on April 2, 2005. He had suffered from the same ailment.
Apparently the Church defines a miracle as any event for which it cannot currently provide an explanation, which leads one to wonder how many saints have snuck into heaven on the basis of miracles that are now completely explicable by modern science. For my own part, I would consider an event miraculous only if it defied the laws of science. If, for example, the sun really did demonstrably stand still in the sky, as we are told it did for Joshua (thus implying an otherwise calamitous halt in the earth’s rotation) without discernible ill effects, that would be a miracle. Falling up might also qualify. Inexplicable medical events are pretty commonplace, and a recovery from Parkinson’s really rates as no more than a mystery, particularly if, as the article hints, there were some questions about the diagnosis in the first place.
But let all that pass. Personally, I suspect that the Pontiff is setting the stage for his successor to be as o’er-hasty to beatify him, as he has been to sanctify his not overly saintly predecessor. My current audiobook is “I, Claudius”, and this beatification scam brought to mind a scene in the book in which Livia, the unspeakably evil widow of Augustus (who has already been raised to godhood by the Roman Senate) pleads with Claudius to do his best to see that she is similarly elected after death, it being her only hope of escaping eternal punishment in the Roman equivalent of hell. One wonders if Benedict, considering his somewhat checkered past, is hoping for a similar get out of jail free card.
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