Glory of being raised to Catholic Altars overshadowed by canonisation of post-Conciliar Popes

Bergoglio has a record that will be almost impossible to surpass: he is the first pope to have proclaimed three of his predecessors saints and to have beatified a fourth. The circumstance is unprecedented and is destined not to be repeated.

Already a year after his election, in a single ceremony, Francis canonised John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli) and John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła), then in 2018 it was the turn of Paul VI (Giovanni Battista Montini), whom Bergoglio himself had beatified exactly four years earlier; finally, in 2022, he declared Blessed John Paul I (Albino Luciani), pontiff for just over a month and probable future saint.

Thus, all the popes who reigned from 1958 to 2005 rose to the honours of the altars.

Bernard Lecomte, author of a reliable biography of Wojtyła, in his Dictionnaire amoureux des Papes has highlighted with successful journalistic emphasis another aspect of this new phenomenon in the history of sanctity: 'What can we say about the extraordinary papal celebration organised in Rome on 27 April 2014 by Pope Francis, who presided over the canonisation ceremony of John XXIII and John Paul II, having his predecessor Benedict XVI, who had become pope "emeritus", at his side? Two living Popes canonising two dead Popes: this 'feast of the four popes', unprecedented in history, was watched by two billion television viewers!".

In the context of this recent papal sanctity it thus seemed normal to many that during the funeral of Benedict XVI a few banners were raised by the crowd with the words 'saint now', in imitation of those raised in 2005 for John Paul II with greater determination.

To quench these predictable enthusiasms, Joseph Ratzinger's secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, stated in his much-criticised and widely read memoir that he personally had no doubts about his sanctity, but cautiously added: 'Well aware also of the sensitivity expressed to me privately by Benedict XVI, I will not allow myself to take any steps to accelerate a canonical process.

Infrequent glory

No wonder the 'sensitivity' of a disenchanted connoisseur of history like Ratzinger. The glory of the altars has not been frequent for the Popes of Rome.

Whoever scrolls through the list of the successors of the Apostle Peter - about three hundred popes and antipopes - is struck by one fact: of the 81 traditionally venerated as saints, 73 are in the first millennium, and as many as 55 of these are concentrated in the first five centuries.

The explanation is simple: until the beginning of the Middle Ages, the papacy also wanted to celebrate itself and its origins in this way, idealised and proposed as exemplary.

Certainly within the framework of complex historical events, recently studied by Roberto Rusconi in the seven hundred pages of Holy Father (Viella), which investigate this singular history, arriving at the cause of Pope Wojtyła.

More than others, in short, the difficult papal sanctity is a political sanctity, so much so that in its regard the Church of Rome has been realistic and very prudent. Until the last decades.

Before the pontificate (1939-1958) of Pius XII, in fact, only four popes after the year 1000 had become saints. In the 11th century they were the Alsatian Leo IX - on whose tomb wonders and miracles multiplied - and then Gregory VII, great protagonists of the radical reform known as Gregorian reform but initiated and desired by the German empire.

Two centuries later came the story of Celestine V, who left the throne of Peter and went down in history for Dante's scathing remarks of his 'great refusal'. Later still, Pius V, the Pope who had promoted the alliance against the Turks defeated in 1571 at Lepanto, is proclaimed a saint.

It was Gregory VII himself who theorised this Papal sanctity in Dictatus papae, solemnly declaring that "the Roman pontiff, if he has been canonically ordained, by the merits of blessed Peter undoubtedly becomes a saint".

A little later the statement is visually translated in the frescoes of the Oratory of St Nicholas in the Lateran, where each of the popes who succeeded one another between 1061 and 1119 is depicted as sanctus, to celebrate the reforming papacy.

Politics condition the dramatic story and canonisation of the hermit Pietro del Morrone, pontiff for five months in 1294 under the name of Celestine V at the behest of Charles II of Anjou and proclaimed saint in 1313 by the first Avignon pope.

The context was the clash between the theocratic papacy strenuously affirmed by Boniface VIII and the French national monarchy of Philip IV the Fair.

Pope Caetani, who had succeeded Celestine, had died, but the king failed to obtain the condemnation of Boniface and the canonisation of Celestine. In fact, the Frenchman Clement V, despite being pressurised by the king, somehow resisted and decreed that his predecessor be proclaimed a saint - a chronicler wrote - as "Saint Peter the confessor, since that was his name before the papacy, that is to say, Peter of Morrone". In this way, Celestine's controversial renunciation was ratified, but also the legitimacy of Boniface, the pontiff hated by Philip.

In the midst of the modern age, as the power of the Church of Rome declined on the European scene, the political celebration of the papacy resurfaced with Pius V, the great inquisitor later protagonist of the resounding naval victory at Lepanto, who was beatified in 1672 and canonised in 1712.

Less than a century later, it was paradoxically the revolutionary and Napoleonic storm, with the deportation to France of two popes, Pius VI and Pius VII, that increased the prestige of a persecuted papacy.

And it is no coincidence that after 1870, when the dogma of papal infallibility was proclaimed and temporal power collapsed, the new exaltation of the papacy was accompanied until 1898 by the confirmation of the cult of six medieval popes (five of them as blessed, half of the ten pontiffs thus venerated).

The novelty of Pius XII

But the novelty came with Pius XII, who in 1951 beatified and in 1954 declared Pius X, who had died forty years earlier and whose collaborator he had been at the highest levels of the curia, a saint.

A very popular figure due to his modest origins and clear pastoral profile, the Venetian pontiff - repressor of modernism and at the same time a radical reformer - already enjoyed a reputation as a miracle-worker during his lifetime, about which Pius X himself joked wittily, as a witness reported: 'Now they are talking and printing that I have started to perform miracles, as if I had nothing else to do... What do you want? You have to do everything in this world'. The canonisation of Pope Sarto, opposed because of the excesses in the anti-modernist repression but strongly desired by Pacelli, was followed in 1956 by the beatification of Innocent XI, exalted as the defender of Europe after the defeat of the Turks, who had been stopped in Vienna in 1683.

Only a decade later, in 1965, as Vatican II was drawing to a close, it was Paul VI who denounced the political use of papal sanctity. Faced in fact with the proposal to canonise John XXIII at the Council, whom the progressives set against Pius XII, Montini arranged for the causes of both to be set in motion by the ordinary way: the intention - says the Pope - was to avoid "that any other motive, other than the worship of true holiness and that is the glory of God and the edification of His Church, should recompose their authentic and dear figures for our veneration".

This, however, introduces the principle of balancing one pontiff against another.

Thus, while Pius XII's cause slowed down for his silence in the face of the Shoah, John XXIII was beatified in 2000 along with Pius IX, amidst inevitable controversy for Pope Mastai's behaviour during the Risorgimento.

And the same happens in 2014, when Roncalli and Wojtyła are proclaimed saints, whose cause was introduced in 2005, less than a month after his death, by Benedict XVI, who does not resist pressure, and already in 2011 beatifies his immediate predecessor.

It is therefore the entire protagonist papacy of Vatican II that has been raised to the glory of the altars at the behest of the three non-Italian popes that have succeeded one another since 1978.

This is unprecedented but overshadowed by growing controversy: for the failed handling of abuses during John Paul II's pontificate, an appeal for his 'decanonisation' was launched in France in 2019, while in the United States it was proposed to suppress his public worship in 2020.

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