This is a big day in the Catholic Church. Rome today is overflowing with the faithful who have traveled from the Ends of the Earth (purely a metaphor) to cheer and weep when the current Pope canonizes two of his predecessors. So by about noon today (Rome time) there will be two more names to add to the list of those regarded by Catholic officialdom as holy enough to be named a saint. I looked on the internet for how many actual named saints there are, and it seems that the number is hard to estimate. One modern source that attempts a clear analysis puts the number canonized since 993 CE (or AD, if you prefer), the year when the then pope (John XV) canonized the first saint, as 285 prior to the papacy of John Paul II. This worthy gentleman in his 23 year reign canonized a whopping 480 saints. His successor, Benedict XVI managed only 45, but Francis I, in his first year on the job, has already raised 10 (including today’s pair) to sainthood; so much for the numbers.
Somewhere deep in the recesses of my memory is the information that when I was a boy of 8 or 9, I was required to attend a catholic school and, on Sundays, its associated church. One of the misremembered “facts” that stuck with me at the time was that saints were created in order to provide a name to every day of the year, such as St Patrick’s, or St George’s. This was back in post-war England in 1946, well before the time of John Paul II, when there were fewer named saints than there were days in the year-no longer the case!
My current readings inform me that in order to be named a saint a person has first of all to be dead for five years, to be regarded as having lived a worthy life and to have performed two miracles, for which evidence must exist. Francis I, however, seems to be disregarding the miracle prerequisite since only one miracle could be found for John XXIII, and some of the lesser-headline saints of Francis’s regime have no miracles in their locker. Maybe he has decided that miracles are old school and he is going to resort to other criteria-number of publications in refereed journals, perhaps?
Speaking of miracles there are those of us who believe that several such are performed every weekend on the playing fields of the major football leagues; one example would be Wayne Rooney’s goal scored from the half-way line a couple of weeks ago. In my way of thinking, a football game is a sort of metaphor of life; there are a few miraculous moments, a few violent ones, dispersed in a vast medium of boring humdrum.
This brings us to the Sinners mentioned in the title. Defining sinners is a lot less complicated than defining saints; for one thing there is a list of ten dos and donts that came down to us from Mount Sinai on tablets of stone. On perusing these it appears that I am a Category I reprobate. The first four are about establishing who is the boss, and whose name I must not take in vain, or give worship to false gods, or work on the Sabbath, otherwise a whole lot of nasty stuff will be visited upon me and my offspring, down to the fourth generation. In these, God is admitting jealously, and indicating vanity; I make an F grade here, sorry kids! It doesn’t get much better as we go down the list, although I get some redemption in honoring my parents, not having committed murder or theft or bearing false witness. Then there is adultery and coveting my neighbor’s house, wife, servant or Porsche, etc.; here again I have been found wanting.
Meanwhile folks, for those who might have been taking notice, the condom dispenser remains firmly attached to the outer wall of the pharmacy here in Castiglione della Pescaia, just a short train ride from St Peter’s basilica, where artificial contraception is regarded as intrinsically evil.
La comedia continua…