"Saint John Paul II?"

The phenomenon of Pope John Paul II’s super celebrity status is driving the media in some places (Rome among others) to encourage his immediate canonization. By way of response prelates there are praising him in escalating encomiums, as “Il Grande,” a worker of miracles (when the presidents of Israel and Syria shake hands at his funeral), and possesed of other larger than life attributes.

There is a certain deservedness in this urging for sainthood for John Paul II. After all, he presided over more beatifications (which is stage one) and canonizations (the final goal) than any Pope in recent memory. He added an impressive and considerable number of new saints. (Kenneth Woodward, Making Saints, p. 120.)

Some might wonder if the stepped-up process toward sainthood might devalue the aura which should properly surround the saints on high. Is saint-making to be governed by the principle the Dodo expressed in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes”?

But I figure, the more saints the better. By enrolling so many new saints John Paul II actually made the very idea of “saint” overlap more closely with the way that word is used in other communions, even if that was never his intention. For other Christians “saint” simply identifies a person who lives demonstrably by Christian faith. You’ll find that implication in the Bible, when Paul the Apostle (himself a saint) wrote to those “called to be saints… who are in Ephesus / Phillipi / Colossae.” The word is always collective. Of the 66 uses of the term in the New Revised Standard Version only one is in the singular, and that one is in the phrase “every saint.”

Regarding his own bona fides for sainthood, surely John Paul II taught us how to die. Faithfully, humanly, boldly he showed us commitment in the face of suffering, responsibility to one’s calling no matter what the circumstances, tenacity in the name of Christ. To be a saint you have to die. You have to give up what was in order to be ready for what will be. That is the only way the new can come alive. John Paul II showed us that.

So, why not a Saint John Paul II? And Oscar Romero? And Dorothy Day? And Martin Luther King? And, in my own part of the Christian family, Chief Albert Luthuli and Reinhold Neibuhr and even Hubert Humphrey? Actually, as the old children’s hymn puts it,
“There’s not any reason, no, not the least
Why I shouldn’t be one too.”