What Is a Saint? Recognising Someone as Worth Imitating and Asking

The designation serves several functions at once. It supplies models, since an abstract ideal is harder to follow than a person who lived and can be described, which is why such figures are presented in narrative rather than as principles. It supplies patrons, since a figure recognised as being present with God can be asked to intercede, which is the practice that distinguishes traditions accepting it from those rejecting it as unnecessary or improper. It supplies identity for places and groups, since a locality, a trade or a nation with a patron has a focus for its collective life. It marks continuity, connecting the present community to figures from its past. And it authorises, since the recognition is a formal statement by an institution about what a good life consists of.

Recognition moved from local and popular to central and formal:

• •Early practice recognised martyrs by local acclamation, with communities venerating their own dead
• •Local bishops then confirmed cults, which introduced an authority without centralising it
• •Papal reservation of the decision developed from the tenth century and was asserted firmly by the twelfth
• •A formal judicial process emerged, with evidence, witnesses and an advocate appointed to argue against the case
• •Modern procedure requires documented heroic virtue and generally attested miracles at defined stages
• •Recognition of martyrdom follows a shorter route, since the manner of death is itself the evidence

The practice has been rejected by substantial traditions and the objections are theological rather than incidental. Protestant reformers argued that asking such figures to intercede detracts from direct access to God, that scripture describes all believers as holy rather than a recognised subset, and that the cult of such figures had in practice become a system of patronage with financial and institutional interests attached. Those arguments led to the removal of images, the end of pilgrimage to their shrines across large regions, and a redefinition of the word in Protestant usage to mean any believer. Orthodox traditions recognise such figures and use a less centralised process. Islamic and Jewish traditions have comparable figures venerated in some communities and contested in others, with the objections following similar lines about intercession and about practices at tombs.

The assignment of particular figures to particular places, trades and situations is extensive and the logic behind it is sometimes clear and frequently arbitrary. Associations derive from the manner of a death, so a figure executed with a particular instrument becomes the patron of the trade using it, from an episode in a biography, from a place of burial or from a linguistic accident where a name resembles a word. New assignments are made for modern occupations and technologies, which produces the occasional news item about a patron of the internet or of aviation. Trade guilds organised around their patron and funded chapels and processions, so the assignment carried real institutional weight rather than being decorative. Many of the associations survive in the names of places, churches, schools and hospitals long after anyone could say why that figure was chosen.

The distribution of recognised figures is informative about the institutions doing the recognising. Historically the process favoured people from religious orders, from the clergy and from the aristocracy, since those were the people with advocates, documentation and the institutional means to pursue a case, which takes years and costs money. Lay people, women and people from outside Europe are underrepresented for the same structural reasons. Recent practice has deliberately addressed that, with substantial numbers of recognitions from outside Europe and increased attention to lay figures. The requirement for attested miracles has been criticised as a barrier that has more to do with documentation than with the life concerned. And the modern volume of recognitions is far higher than historically, which has prompted the criticism that the designation means less when it is common.

Recognition supplies models to imitate and patrons to ask, and the second is what Protestant traditions rejected on the grounds that it detracts from direct access. The process moved from local acclamation through episcopal confirmation to a formal judicial procedure with an advocate arguing against the case. It has historically favoured those with institutional advocates, which recent practice has tried to correct.