A senior Vatican observer asks in Newsweek – Why is the Vatican rushing the beatification of a pope who oversaw its worst scandal in centuries?
The Newsweek article by John Allen who is senior Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and author of The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church, states:
When Pope John Paul II is beatified on May 1 before an audience of hundreds of thousands in St. Peter’s Square, the event will mark a new land-speed record for arrival at the final stage before sainthood, beating Mother Teresa’s previous mark by 15 days. Some have objected to the haste, particularly given persistent questions about John Paul’s handling of the sexual-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. Yet if the child is father to the man, this is a clear case of the pope being father to the saint.
John Paul notoriously presided over what wags called a “saint-making factory” during his almost 27 years atop the Catholic Church. He produced more beatifications (1,338) and canonizations (482) than all previous popes combined—and since Catholic tradition acknowledges 263 previous popes stretching back nearly 2,000 years, that’s no mean feat.
This avalanche of halos was the result of a deliberate policy. In 1983, John Paul overhauled the sainthood process to make it quicker, cheaper, and less adversarial, eliminating the office of “Devil’s advocate” and dropping the required number of miracles. His aim was to lift up contemporary role models of holiness in order to show a jaded secular world that sanctity is alive in the here and now.
A substantial share of John Paul’s picks lived in the 20th century, from Padre Pio to Mother Teresa to Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei. In that sense, John Paul’s fast-track beatification is a natural byproduct of his own policies, which have been largely upheld by his successor and erstwhile right-hand man, Pope Benedict XVI.
Yet John Paul’s cause is also a reminder, at least for some, of why waiting a little while isn’t always such a bad thing.
In theory, sainthood is supposed to be a democratic process, beginning with a popular grassroots sentiment that a given figure was a saint. Six years ago, the evidence of that conviction vis-à-vis Karol Wojtyla, the given name of John Paul II, seemed like a slam-dunk.
This was, after all, the pope who brought down communism, who was seen in the flesh by more people than any other figure in human history, who reinvigorated Catholicism after a period of doubt and confusion, and who gave rise to an entire “John Paul II” generation of young priests and bishops eager to take the church’s message to the street.
Crowds chanted “Santo subito!”—“Sainthood now!”—at his funeral mass. The cardinals who gathered to elect the next pope signed a petition asking whoever it might be to waive the normal five-year waiting period to launch a cause, which Benedict XVI swiftly did. Adulatory coverage in the global media amounted to a sort of secular canonization, making the formal ecclesiastical process seem almost anticlimactic.
Today, however, that enthusiasm has been tempered by revelations about the role of the late pope and his aides in the sexual-abuse crisis—by any reckoning, the most destructive Catholic scandal in centuries, and one that critics say metastasized on John Paul’s watch.
Continues at:
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/04/17/fast-track-saint.html