Religión Digital
Canonization, in theory, is the moment when the Catholic Church solemnly declares that a person is in Heaven. In practice, it is the point where a human biography, inevitably ambiguous, becomes a carefully edited official narrative. From that moment on, everything that is uncomfortable gets reinterpreted, what bothers is contextualized, and what does not fit… simply ceases to be relevant.
Sanctity, understood this way, is not so much a spiritual quality as a sophisticated process of narrative purification.
Heavenly statistics with earthly bias
For centuries, altars have functioned as a space of social selection far less mystical than the iconography suggests. The now classic 1955 study by Katherine and Charles H. George, Roman Catholic Sainthood and Social Status (The Journal of Religion, University of Chicago), examined 2,494 saints and blessed with sufficient data to classify their social origin. The result is as unmiraculously revealing as it is telling:
78% came from upper or well-to-do classes
17% from the middle class
5% from popular backgrounds
The authors themselves qualify the limitations of the analysis—it is not simple to compare social structures across two millennia—but even so they conclude the obvious: institutionalized sanctity has tended to reproduce the social hierarchies of its time. Put less academically: even heaven seems to have preferred those who already had access to networks, education, and patrons.
The court of virtues (and its creative exceptions)
The Church, of course, maintains that canonization processes are rigorous. Virtues, writings, miracles and possible scandals are reviewed. For centuries there even existed a figure designed to derail candidacies: the “devil’s advocate.” His function was simple and quite salutary: to seek everything that contradicted the candidate’s sanctity. Not because the Church mistrusted its saints, but because, in theory, it wanted to be sure. That prudence has softened over time.
The problem is not that saints have not had shadows. The problem is what is done with them depending on the calendar moment. If an uncomfortable fact appears before canonization, it can become a decisive obstacle. If it appears after, it becomes “historical complexity.” The biography does not change; the management of the narrative changes.
Some contemporary examples illustrate this with surgical precision.
Modern saints, ancient dilemmas
Teresa of Calcutta was canonized at record speed by modern Vatican standards. Her figure has been venerated as a symbol of absolute dedication to the poor, but has also been the subject of academic and journalistic criticism regarding the unsanitary conditions of her shelters, her theological vision of suffering, and her relationships with certain political and financial elites. Before canonization, these questions were part of the debate. After, they occupy the space reserved for “incomplete readings” of a life too great to be judged by worldly criteria.
John Paul II represents another version of the same phenomenon, at global scale. A key figure in the collapse of the Soviet bloc and in the media expansion of the papacy, his legacy is undeniably historical. But it has also been subject to debate over the institutional handling of cases of sexual abuse within the Church during his pontificate and over appointment decisions subsequently questioned. In strict terms, none of this prevented his canonization. In narrative terms, all of it was reordered within a life “extraordinary with inevitable human limitations.” An impeccable formula, impossible to refute and very difficult to discuss without appearing to have lost one’s sense of proportion.
Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer introduces another variant: that of the institutionalized founder. Presented as the great theologian of sanctification in the everyday, his figure has also generated controversy over the internal functioning of Opus Dei, its disciplinary structure, and the exceptional speed of his canonization. His defenders see spiritual innovation; his critics see accelerated institutional construction. Canonization, as usually happens, chose one of the two narratives and turned the other into background noise.
The pattern repeats with a regularity that no longer seems coincidence, but method.
The Calasanz case: when the institution also trembles
The case of José de Calasanz adds a particularly uncomfortable layer, because it shows how a biography can become trapped in the clash between hagiography and institutional crisis.
Founder of the Pious Schools and pioneer of popular education in the seventeenth century, Calasanz watched his project become the scene of a profound internal crisis within the order. Various accusations of serious misconduct within the congregation, along with disciplinary conflicts and power struggles, resulted in a situation of extreme ecclesiastical tension.
In that context, the case of the priest Stefano Cherubini has been pointed to by documented sources and historical reconstructions as one of the most delicate elements of the internal conflict, with accusations of sexual abuse of minors and his continued presence in positions of influence within the order. The handling of the crisis—between internal disciplinary measures, institutional protection, and external pressures—has been interpreted divergently: for some historians, as an attempt to sustain an educational work in formation; for others, as an episode where the logic of institutional survival weighed more than transparency.
The outcome was unequivocal in institutional terms: the order was temporarily suppressed in 1646 by decision of Innocent X’s papal authority, before being restored years later after the founder’s death. The controversy, however, did not disappear: it was reabsorbed in the later hagiographic construction, where conflicts cease to be open processes to become carefully managed shadows.
Sanctity as luxury edition
Canonization does not eliminate human ambiguity: it reorganizes it. It takes complex historical lives and converts them into narratives of sustained moral coherence, where gray zones become background decoration. It is not exactly falsification; it is something more sophisticated: a theological edition of biographical material.
Theology resolves the tension with an elegant formula: the Church is infallible in declaring that someone is in Heaven, but not necessarily in the historical reconstruction of their life. It is an impeccable solution from the doctrinal point of view and extraordinarily flexible from the historiographical point of view.
Less pious translation: the verdict is not discussed; the narrative is rewritten.
Engineering of institutional memory
The political dimension of the system is not accidental either. In the Middle Ages, canonization consolidated power and devotions. In modernity, it builds global references. John Paul II accelerated the pace until it became an almost industrial phenomenon; Francis has reoriented the catalog toward contemporary sensibilities. Each era canonizes what it needs to tell itself.
History, when it disturbs, does not disappear: it is reordered.
And the most significant thing is that there is no exit mechanism. There is no desacralization. There is no formal review of the file once sealed by infallibility. Only later reinterpretations, academic debates, and carefully managed silences.
User’s manual for believers with reasonable doubts
Fortunately—and this is always reassuring when one looks at the catalog of saints with a slightly inquisitive spirit—the obligation to believe in the concrete sanctity of a person does not belong to the hard core of the deposit of faith. That is, no one is signing a metaphysical contract that obliges one to assume that each canonized person embodies without flaw the ideal of virtue that their official biography suggests with such narrative effectiveness.
The famous “infallibility” of canonizations, by the way, is not even a dogma of faith in the technical sense. It is rather a traditionally sustained theological conviction, a sort of elegant certainty transmitted with the naturalness with which institutions transmit certainties about themselves: it is not defined solemnly as an article of faith, but is presupposed with sufficient firmness so that questioning it sounds, at minimum, unnecessarily uncomfortable.
This produces a curious effect: one can venerate without problem, one can disagree in a low voice without scandal, and one can even harbor perfectly reasonable doubts without activating doctrinal alarms. All very orderly, very civilized, very characteristic of an institution that has learned to coexist with complexity without needing to eliminate it… only to manage it carefully.
In other words: sanctity is official, canonization is solemn, and the obligation to believe in all of it is, as usually happens with the most important things, surprisingly flexible. The only truly stable thing is the margin for maneuvering to interpret it… provided one knows how to do so with adequate discretion.