In All Things

A 4,700 word gauntlet has been thrown down before what I guess is perceived as America's liberal-secular triumphalism (apparently made real to social conservative imagination by the Obama ascendancy) via the "Manhattan Declaration," which "issues a clarion call to Christians to adhere to their convictions and informs civil authorities that the signers will not - under any circumstance - abandon their Christian consciences."

The declaration unites Christians across many a sectarian divide in their resistance to abortion and gay marriage and in support of religious liberty. The tone is pretty "onward Christian soldier" in a none-too-subtle attempt to perhaps reignite the culture wars that Obama's "let's be reasonable, shall we" style of rhetoric seemed intent on avoiding. Apparently no longer waiting for Obama to start a fight, the group of 149 Orthodox, Catholic and evangelical Christian leaders--including Archbishops Timothy Dolan of New York, Charles Chaput of Denver and Washington's Donald Wuerl--has opted for a preemptive rhetorical strike on the the looming Obama-socialist-athiest makeover of America. 

Some major points from the declaration:

• It is ironic that those who today assert a right to kill the unborn, aged and disabled and also a right to engage in immoral sexual practices, and even a right to have relationships integrated around these practices be recognized and blessed by law - such persons claiming these "rights" are very often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to express their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife.

• Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God's.

From the New York Times coverage of the decalaration's release: "Ira C. Lupu, a law professor at George Washington University Law School, said it was 'fear-mongering' to suggest that religious institutions would be forced to do any of those things. He said they are protected by the First Amendment, and by conscience clauses that allow medical professionals and hospitals to opt out of performing certain procedures, and religious exemptions written into same-sex marriage bills."

I hope I am not proved wrong by events, but I find myself wondering, much in the manner America's hard right-wing seems chasing after something of an anti-idealized shadow of the real political world according to Obama, this alliance of spiritual leaders pursues a cultural phantasm of its own making.

Here's the story from the London Times online.

A Vatican scholar claims to have deciphered the "death certificate" imprinted on the Shroud of Turin, or Holy Shroud, a linen cloth revered by Christians and held by many to bear the image of the crucified Jesus.

Dr Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican secret archives, said "I think I have managed to read the burial certificate of Jesus the Nazarene, or Jesus of Nazareth." She said that she had reconstructed it from fragments of Greek, Hebrew and Latin writing imprinted on the cloth together with the image of the crucified man.

...

Like the image of the man himself the letters are in reverse and only make sense in negative photographs. Dr Frale told La Repubblica that under Jewish burial practices current at the time of Christ in a Roman colony such as Palestine, a body buried after a death sentence could only be returned to the family after a year in a common grave.

A death certificate was therefore glued to the burial shroud to identify it for later retrieval, and was usually stuck to the cloth around the face. This had apparently been done in the case of Jesus even though he was buried not in a common grave but in the tomb offered by Joseph of Arimathea.

Dr Frale said that many of the letters were missing, with Jesus for example referred to as "(I)esou(s) Nnazarennos" and only the "iber" of "Tiberiou" surviving. Her reconstruction, however, suggested that the certificate read: "In the year 16 of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius Jesus the Nazarene, taken down in the early evening after having been condemned to death by a Roman judge because he was found guilty by a Hebrew authority, is hereby sent for burial with the obligation of being consigned to his family only after one full year". It ends "signed by" but the signature has not survived.

Dr Frale said that the use of three languages was consistent with the polyglot nature of a community of Greek-speaking Jews in a Roman colony. Best known for her studies of the Knights Templar, who she claims at one stage preserved the shroud, she said what she had deciphered was "the death sentence on a man called Jesus the Nazarene. If that man was also Christ the Son of God it is beyond my job to establish. I did not set out to demonstrate the truth of faith. I am a Catholic, but all my teachers have been atheists or agnostics, and the only believer among them was a Jew. I forced myself to work on this as I would have done on any other archaeological find."

The Catholic Church has never either endorsed the Turin Shroud or rejected it as inauthentic

Read the rest here.

James Martin, SJ

Frank Clooney's post below got me thinking about who else should be a saint.  Given that I'm not the pope, I don't have much say in the matter, but here's my Top Five list.   (I'm leaving out those who are already on the fast track like Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, John Henry Newman, etc.)  Of course it all depends on whether these men and women get going and intercede for some miracles.  But here are some whose causes seem obvious choices.

1.) John XXIII.  Come on.  He's about the holiest guy I can imagine.  Read his incredible book The Journal of a Soul, a series of diary entries from the time he was a young seminarian to the end of his life, to see how humility can co-exist with great learning and wisdom.  And how humor can co-exist with holiness.  "Your Holiness, how many people work in the Vatican?" a journalist asked.  "About half of them."  How many popes could have a book like this written about them?  Holy, prayerful, humble, funny, warm, loving, hardworking.  Saint?   A slam dunk.

2.) Dorothy Day.  For all the reasons Fr. Clooney says.  Her quote, "Don't make me a saint; I don't want to be dismissed that easily," is often used against those who support her canonization.  But she had a great devotion to the saints, wrote a book about St. Therese of Lisieux, and understood their essential place in our faith.  Her recently published journals, The Duty of Delight, edited by Robert Ellsberg, show new aspects of her holiness (for example, caring for the dying wife of her former husband, Forster).  Amazing.

3.) Oscar Romero.  Another obvious saint.  And martyr, for God's sake.  Literally.  Killed for his defense of the poor, while he was celebrating Mass.  The holdup is unbelievable.  Almost unconscionable. 

4.) Peter Favre.  Never heard of him?  Often called the "Second Jesuit."  (That's him up top, in the cassock and biretta.)  Close friend of St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier, and the man who Ignatius said could best direct people through the Spiritual Exercises.  (And you figure Ignatius was a fairly good judge of this.)  During the time of the Reformation, when everyone else was condemning Protestants, Peter (Pierre) was praying for them and reminding his brother Jesuits (and other Christians) to love them both in word and in deed.  "Take care, take care," he wrote, "never to shut your heart to anyone."  (That comment should make him the patron of bloggers.)  His lovely (but long) Memoriale is a wonderful window into a sometimes-overlooked spiritual master.  The pious legend is that he is still Blessed, and won't intercede for a miracle to cement his canonization, because he doesn't want to take the attention away from his friends Ignatius and Francis.  But they're plenty famous now, Peter.  Time for your final miracle.

5.) Dorothy Stang.  Another martyr, though in a different context than we are used to.  When her killers came for her, she read passages to them from her Bible.  At a time when the Vatican is investigating the "quality of life" of American women religious, they might take a look at the quality of her life. 

Santi subito!

Other suggestions welcome.

James Martin, SJ

I was first introduced to the work of Flannery O'Connor in a literature class during my freshman year of college. Since that time, I have spent hours reading her stories, as well as a good deal about O'Connor herself--and I have not been shy about voicing my enthusiasm. (My car bears a bright, blue "I'd rather be reading Flannery O'Connor" bumper sticker.) Therefore, I was encouraged this morning to read that I am far from alone in my affinity for her work. O'Connor's collection, "The Complete Stories," came out on top in an online poll that asked voters to choose the best book to win the National Book Award for fiction. According to The New York Times' "Arts Beat" blog: 

The competition was steep: other finalists in the poll were “The Stories of John Cheever,”William Faulkner’s “Collected Stories,” “The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty,” Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” (Then again, the O’Connor book bested some formidable contenders when it won the fiction prize in 1972, including John Updike’s “Rabbit Redux,” Walker Percy’s “Love in the Ruins” and E. L. Doctorow’s “Book of Daniel.”)

O'Connor is often identified by a number of adjectives--as a talented Southern writer or talented Catholic writer or talented female writer. These descriptions are true, but I like to think that a poll like this is a reminder that her work transcends these qualifying terms. O'Connor was a talented writer.

I'm happy to report that Masswepray (see post below) the strange video game, is a hoax, or at least their website today leads you to a weird place.  On the other hand, the Talking Rosary is not.

James Martin, SJ

As we move into the final stage of negotiations and debate over the health care reform bill, it is very important that we not get caught up in two related, but counter, tendencies, the "pass it at all costs" or the "defeat it at all costs" mentalities that betray the triumph of politics over truth. It is important to step back and ask "Why do we care so much?" and "What are we fighting for?" This act of, you will pardon the expression, values clarification will not necessarily help pass a final bill, but it will help make sure that any final bill that passes is honest. And, this examination of why we care is not just about abortion coverage, although it is certainly about that. It is about why we Catholics are so determined to achieve universal health care access in the first place.

Let me stipulate something about the abortion debate. Most of the pro-choice advocates I know are decent, loving people. They do not relish the prospect of an abortion but they believe that it is not their place to tell anyone else what to do in such a situation as an unwanted pregnancy and many of them remember the days when women died procuring illegal abortions. (The suggestion, invoked by some of the less thoughtful pro-choice advocates, that the Stupak Amendment sends women back to the days of back alley abortion is an insult not only to Cong. Stupak’s amendment but to those women who actually did die procuring illegal abortions.) Pro-choice advocates may be wrong, but they are not evil and their concern for women is genuine albeit misguided in its application.

The twentieth century was, in retrospect, not merely the century of technological and scientific revolutions, the century of the atom and Apollo 11, of open-heart surgery and the computer. That century was also one long assault on human dignity. From the day-in and day-out slaughter of the Western front in World War I, through the mass murders of whole classes of people perpetrated by Stalin and Mao, through the targeting of civilian populations in World War II and beyond, to the final, genocidal crimes in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur, one long assault on human dignity. The apologists for each of these crimes saw benefit in their willingness to ignore the humanity of those they were killing. They were defeating the terrible Hun, building a better future for the proletariat, bringing the war to a faster conclusion, redressing prior wrongs. And, in each of these cases, the language of utility came to dominate, and becloud, the minds of those who defended the crimes.

Abortion is not like Darfur, still less Ukraine circa 1932, or Auschwitz or Hiroshima. But, those who defend abortion do so on the kind of utilitarian grounds that have become dangerously commonplace in the justifications for crimes in the twentieth century. There is a problem, the unwanted pregnancy, and there is a solution, abortion. Human beings, however, are not problems to be solved, even the littlest ones still in the womb, they are humans to be accorded dignity and respect. We Catholics believe this and it is not the kind of belief one tosses aside during a mark-up session on Capitol Hill.

In America today, there is precisely no prospect of overturning Roe V. Wade, and if Roe were overturned, most states would enact its provisions into statutory law the next day. I think Roe was wrongly decided, of course, but it will only be changed at the end of a long, cultural process of creating a Culture of Life, not at the beginning of that process. But, Roe was decided on specific grounds, namely, by invoking the privacy of the woman to make her own choice: Government cannot tell a woman what she can do with her own body. If that is the legal ground upon which the pro-choice argument stands, then it is more than a little bizarre that they now demand not an immunity from government interference but a government subsidy for the procedure. This turns Roe on its head faster than any pro-life argument I can think of.

Catholics believe that human beings are not encased in a prior privacy but are born into the world as social beings, that human identity and dignity is not rooted in our powers of rationality or capacity for independence, but in our profound ability to love and be loved, an ability first made manifest in the relationship between mother and child. That is why some Catholics are so appalled by abortion and sometimes say and do things that also assault human dignity. (I do not mean to excuse the Randall Terry’s of the world by that observation, just to explain it.) The point is that this commitment to human dignity is so basic, so primordial to a Catholic’s sensibility, that it propels us to insist that health care reform not be used as a vehicle for further deadening the conscience of our culture.

This same commitment to human dignity drives us Catholics to support universal health care. There are parts of the current bill before the Senate that could be better, no doubt. But, this is the closest the American polity has ever come to establishing in law the right to health care. There is no other option at the moment, nor in the foreseeable future. If we believe that those who mindlessly rush to extend abortion coverage are denying human dignity, we must also believe that those, mostly Republicans, who are objecting to the reform effort are not defending human dignity either.

As Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate the Church’s commitment to human dignity is not dividable. Life issues are social justice issues and social justice issues are life issues. The thing for members of Congress to remember in this final stage of the debate is this: Life is a precious gift from God. Human life demands the protection of our health care system and that protection can not be won by sacrificing unborn human life without denying the very same humane impulse that urges us towards health care reform in the first place.

Two interviews  -- Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of Rome's Christian unity council, in Osservatore Romano; and Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster in The Tablet -- have coincided with a speech yesterday by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, at the Gregorian University in Rome. Taken together, they shed some new light on Catholic-Anglican relations following the announcement of "ordinariates" for Anglicans seeking communion with the See of Peter.

1. Canterbury kept in the dark. When he first learned of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF)'s proposal, about two weeks before it was announced, Dr Williams called Cardinal Kasper in the middle of the night in search of reassurance. Cardinal Kasper: "We did not participate directly in the conversations, but we were kept updated". Archbishop Nichols: “It is a difficult thing to do and opening it up to public consultation would have made it public" he says, going on to blame Anglican bishops who were in contact with Rome about it for failing to inform the primate of the Communion. "While approaches had been made to the Holy See, I don’t think that had been conveyed to the Archbishop of Canterbury ... Frankly, it was the Anglicans' duty to do that." Asked if the CDF was discourteous to Dr Williams, he says: “I can’t answer that.”

2. Significance of the announcement. Cardinal Kasper: "While a "Uniate" Church has its own structured hierarchy, with a patriarch and territorial dioceses, none of this will apply to the former Anglican "personal ordinariates," which will provide pastoral care for the faithful but without their own ecclesiastical territory, a little bit like the military ordinariates." Dr Williams describes it as "an imaginative pastoral response to the needs of some; but it does not break any fresh ecclesiological ground." Archbishop Nichols: "The Pope wants to give expression and space to the fruit and character of Anglican patrimony. It is quite difficult to know what that means, especially in this country."

3. Threats to Catholic-Anglican dialogue. For Cardinal Kasper, these are entirely on the Anglican side. "There followed the ordination of women to the priesthood and then to the episcopate, the consecration of a homosexual bishop, the blessing of same-sex couples: decisions that have provoked serious tensions within the composite Anglican world." For Dr Williams, at least one of those obstacles is Rome's rejection of women priests. "For many Anglicans, not ordaining women has a possible unwelcome implication about the difference between baptised men and baptised women," he says, before asking: “In what way does the prohibition against ordaining women so ‘enhance the life of communion’, reinforcing the essential character of filial and communal holiness as set out in Scripture and tradition and ecumenical agreement, that its breach would compromise the purposes of the Church as so defined?”

4. Future of that dialogue. Dr Williams: “If the issues are less basic than the agreement over the Church’s central character, then the future ought to be one in which there is a search for practical convergence in administrative responsibility and visible structures of governance." The “ecumenical glass is genuinely half-full", he adds; "the unfinished business between the two denominations is not as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain." Cardinal Kasper: Dr Williams's Vatican visit "demonstrates that there has not been any rupture". Archbishop Nichols, says The Tablet, "seems anxious to avoid is any risk to relations between Catholics and Anglicans in Britain."

See clips of +Rowan's speech and of Card Kasper's response to journalists' questions after it at Ruth Gledhill's blog here. Her headline? 'Rowan in Rome: the fightback begins'.

The UN-sponsored World Summit on Food Security in Rome ended yesterday leaving many participants frustrated with the lack of progress on food security goals. Few representatives from the developed world even bothered to attend the meeting. The Nov. 16-18 conference, hosted by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, gathered delegates from around the world allegedly to find concrete solutions to end hunger and malnutrition and discuss practical strategies aimed at stabilizing food prices after last year's disastrous and deadly escalation in basic commodity prices. Many attendees suggested the summit fell far from achieving such goals.

As the planet plods into the 21st century and into an era of climate change uncertainty and population concentrations in the poorest regions of the world, concerns are growing around overall agricultural production, which must be improved as much as 70 percent by 2050, and the environmental and human impact of existing ag-methods. According to the FAO, more than 1 billion people are undernourished and one child dies every six seconds because of malnutrition.

Some food security advocates were hoping the summit would be used to elevate and specify hunger and production goals—for example, curtailing First World subsidies, formally committing the UN member states to eradicating global hunger completely by 2025 and increasing aid to developing world farmers to $44 billion annually. Instead vague assurances to “substantially increase” agriculture aid were made, and the draft resolution merely restated the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving world hunger by 2015 and lamely called eradicating hunger “at the earliest possible date.”

Representatives from Catholic international development agencies CIDSE and Caritas Internationalis were particularly critical of the conference outcome. A joint Nov. 16 statement (issued that is before the actual end of the conference but in response to an "outcome declaration" that was released as the summit began. Odd that.) read: "The World Food Summit has failed to produce a concrete agenda for moving away from business as usual, even as the number of hungry in the world continues to rise."

"The outcome Declaration has brought nothing concrete, and many of its statements are open to wide and often concerning interpretations," complained Alicia Kolmans, from CIDSE's German member, Misereor. 

And Bob van Dillen from Cordaid, the Dutch member of the Caritas and CIDSE networks, said, "The Declaration reaffirms the need to invest in small-scale agriculture, but there are no concrete proposals how this should best be done, nor have leaders committed to mobilising the necessary financial commitments within the next five years." 

Michael O' Brien from Trocaire, the Irish member of the CIDSE and Caritas networks, noted, "There is a clear consensus . . . that the liberalisation agenda promoted over the last decades by the World Bank and other actors has categorically failed, and that there is a real need to strengthen farmer's involvement in policy making and implementation."

Though the only Western head of state who made it to the summit was host-nation's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Pope Benedict XVI managed to stop by to address the conference. They got an earful from the pope: "Hunger is the most cruel and concrete sign of poverty," he said. "Opulence and waste are no longer acceptable when the tragedy of hunger is assuming ever greater proportions.

"Norms, legislation, development plans and investments are not enough, however; what is needed is a change in the lifestyles of individuals and communities, in habits of consumption and in perceptions of what is genuinely needed," Pope Benedict said.

The pope called for greater action in creating "a network of economic institutions capable of guaranteeing regular access to sufficient food and water" and argued that countries must "oppose those forms of aid that do grave damage to the agricultural sector, those approaches to food production that are geared solely towards consumption and lack a wider perspective, and especially greed, which causes speculation to rear its head even in the marketing of cereals, as if food were to be treated just like any other commodity."

Certainly all worthy "outcome declarations" for Summit 2010.

Cambridge, MA. I was glad to read Jim Martin's post on the likely beatification and canonization of Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa. We may, as he suggests, rejoice at such a prospect, and I have indeed admired Mother Teresa for a very long time.

     But when Jim concludes by saying, "As I've said before, if John Paul and Mother Teresa aren't canonized then no one should be!" — I would add, I cannot think of a better American saint for our times than Dorothy Day, founder of The Catholic Worker movement and newspaper along with Peter Meurin. Just to read her journals - The Duty of Delight (so wonderfully edited by Robert Ellsberg) convinced me - again - of her lifetime of true, deep, realistic holiness. That she and her best followers were/are not eager to see her canonized — too easy for the rest of us — doesn't take away from the fact that she is a truly great saint. Indeed, this wise distance from the protocols of canonization strengthens the case for her exceptional holiness.

     So I happily emend Jim's statement to read: "Let John Paul and Teresa and Dorothy be canonized together on the same day!" But then, I realize as I write this that one could add Archbishop Romero and a host of other women and men who lived and died as Catholic saints while witnessing to truth and justice... But saint-identifying isn't exactly my expertise, so I'd better stop here.

Responding to the confusion over his absence at the announcement of Anglicanum coetibus, Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Council for Christian Unity, explains what happened in an interview with L'Osservatore Romano.  Sandro Magister, veteran Vatican-watcher relates the story in Chiesa Online...

The phone call in the middle of the night from the archbishop of Canterbury. The distrust of the Eastern Churches. The head of Catholic ecumenism takes us behind the scenes of "Anglicanorum cœtibus"

by Sandro Magister  ROME, November 18, 2009 – Cardinal Walter Kasper has admitted it: "There has been a bit of confusion." He himself contributed to some of the confusion, involuntarily.

When on October 20 Cardinal William J. Levada, prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, announced the imminent publication of an apostolic constitution that would regulate the admission of groups from the Anglican Communion into the Catholic Church, he, Kasper, president of the pontifical council for Christian unity and therefore absolutely entitled to be involved, was not in Rome, but in Cyprus, busy with completely unrelated matters.

From this, some deduced that Kasper had wanted to distance himself from a decision that was not his own and with which, perhaps, he did not entirely agree.

Cardinal Kasper was in Cyprus because the island was hosting, from October 16-23, the second round (after the first in Ravenna in 2007) of theological dialogue between Catholics and Orthodox on how to understand papal primacy. An ecumenical dialogue of capital importance, in which Kasper led the delegation from Rome.

There was, therefore, a perfect justification for his absence from Rome at the moment of the announcement of "Anglicanorum Cœtibus," finally signed by the pope on November 4 and made public on the 9th. But the silence that Kasper maintained on the question even after his return from Cyprus continued to prompt speculation about his reservations.

Cardinal Kasper broke this silence with an interview published in "L'Osservatore Romano" on November 15.

The interview is full of clarifying new information. And it gives a little glimpse behind the scenes.

***

"Let's stick to the facts," Cardinal Kasper says in the interview. "A group of Anglicans has asked freely and legitimately to enter the Catholic Church. This is not our initiative. They first approached our council [for Christian unity], and, as president, I replied that the competency belonged to the congregation for the doctrine of the faith. [...] The council has always been kept informed by the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, and it is not true that it was pushed aside. We did not participate directly in the conversations, but we were kept updated, as is proper. The text of the [apostolic] constitution was prepared by the congregation for the doctrine of the faith. We saw the draft and presented our proposals."

In any case, the gestation of "Anglicanorum Cœtibus" was kept secret until the last moment, even from the highest authorities of the Anglican Church. When the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (in the photo with Benedict XVI), was told that it was about to be published, Kasper was already in Cyprus. And he says that Williams called him in the middle of the night, to ask him for an explanation. Kasper says in the interview:

"We we talked about the significance of the new apostolic constitution, and I reassured him about the continuation of our direct talks, as indicated to us by Vatican Council II and as the pope desires. He replied to me that for him, this confirmation is a very important message."

A couple of days later, on October 20, Williams made the announcement from London about the upcoming release of the apostolic Constitution, together with the Catholic archbishop of Westminster, Vincent G. Nichols, at precisely the same time as Cardinal Levada was making the same announcement in Rome. For this reason as well, Kasper says that he appreciates "the balanced attitude" of the archbishop of Canterbury. "Our personal relationship is cordial and transparent. He is a man of spirituality, a theologian. In reality, the obstacles to ecumenical dialogue today can come only from tensions within the Anglican world."

This last statement must be stressed. In Kasper's view, both the desire of some Anglican groups to change to Catholicism and the obstacles to a more general reconciliation between Rome and Canterbury arise not from the desire of the Catholic Church to "expand its empire" ("a ridiculous comment," the cardinal snaps), but from causes entirely internal to the Anglican Communion.

The cardinal describes these causes in the interview...

Read the rest in Chiesa Online.  The original text of the interview with Cardinal Kasper published in "L'Osservatore Romano" on November 15, 2009:  > Una possibilità concreta non contraria all'ecumenismo

James Martin, SJ

Good news from CNA about the soon-to-be-Venerable, soon-to-be Blessed, soon-to-be Saint John Paul II.

Vatican analyst Andrea Tornielli reported this week that the first step toward the beatification of John Paul II has already been completed.  He explained that officials at the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints have given the green light for the proclamation of the late Pope's heroic virtue. Tornielli added that only the signature of Pope Benedict XVI is needed for the proclamation to become official, noting that it “could come during Christmas, when the prefect for the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, Archbishop Angelo Amato, will include it in cardinals’ agenda.” Once the decree is signed, he said, Pope Wojtyla will be given the title of “venerable.”  “Once the decree is officially promulgated,” Tornielli continued, a miracle will then need to be attributed to the intercession of John Paul II.  One case, the curing of a French nun from Parkinson's Disease, could be the miracle recognized by the Congregation.

And to that end, a fascinating and extensive website on the canonization procedure of John Paul here.  As I've said before, if John Paul and Mother Teresa aren't canonized then no one should be! 

James Martin, SJ