Canonization

Canonization is the declaration of a deceased person as an officially recognized saint,^[1] specifically, the official act of a Christian communion declaring a person worthy of public veneration and entering their name in the canon catalogue of saints,^[2] or authorized list of that communion's recognized saints.^[3][4]

Canonization is a papal declaration that the Catholic faithful may venerate a particular deceased member of the church. Popes began making such decrees in the tenth century. Up to that point, the local bishops governed the veneration of holy men and women within their own dioceses; and there may have been, for any particular saint, no formal decree at all. In subsequent centuries, the procedures became increasingly regularized and the Popes began restricting to themselves the right to declare someone a Catholic saint. In contemporary usage, the term is understood to refer to the act by which any Christian church declares that a person who has died is a saint, upon which declaration the person is included in the list of recognized saints, called the "canon".^[5]

In the Roman Martyrology, the following entry is given for the

The Roman Rite's Canon of the Mass contains only the names of apostles and martyrs, along with that of the Blessed Virgin Mary and, since 1962, that of Saint Joseph her spouse.

By the fourth century, however, "confessors"—people who had confessed their faith not by dying but by word and life—began to be venerated publicly. Examples of such people are Saint Hilarion and Saint Ephrem the Syrian in the East, and Saint Martin of Tours and Saint Hilary of Poitiers in the West. Their names were inserted in the diptychs, the lists of saints explicitly venerated in the liturgy, and their tombs were honoured in like manner as those of the martyrs. Since the witness of their lives was not as unequivocal as that of the martyrs, they were venerated publicly only with the approval by the local bishop. This process is often referred to as "local canonization".^[9]

This approval was required even for veneration of a reputed martyr. In his history of the

Though not "canonizations" in the narrow sense, acts of formal recognition, such as the erection of an altar over the saint's tomb or transferring the saint's relics to a church, were preceded by formal inquiries into the sanctity of the person's life and the miracles attributed to that person's intercession.

Such acts of recognition of a saint were authoritative, in the strict sense, only for the diocese or ecclesiastical province for which they were issued, but with the spread of the fame of a saint, were often accepted elsewhere also.

In the

In the Catholic Church, canonization is a decree that allows universal veneration of the saint. For permission to venerate merely locally, only beatification is needed.^[10]

For several centuries the bishops, or in some places only the primates and patriarchs,^[11] could grant martyrs and confessors public ecclesiastical honor; such honor, however, was always decreed only for the local territory of which the grantors had jurisdiction. Only acceptance of the cultus by the Pope made the cultus universal, because he alone can rule the universal Catholic Church.^[12] Abuses, however, crept into this discipline, due as well to indiscretions of popular fervor as to the negligence of some bishops in inquiring into the lives of those whom they permitted to be honoured as saints.

In the Medieval West, the

In his De Servorum Dei beatificatione et de Beatorum canonizatione of five volumes the eminent canonist Prospero Lambertini (1675–1758), who later became