VATICAN CITY — With the news that Pope John Paul I would soon be beatified, Twitter and other social media were filled – again – with the question: Has being pope become a shortcut to canonization?
“It is not a matter of beatifying or canonizing a papacy,” insisted Cardinal Beniamino Stella, postulator of the late pope’s sainthood cause.
Besides, he told CNS, Pope John Paul I was pope for just over one month, and except for martyrs, “you can’t determine someone’s holiness just by 33 or 34 days of his or her life.”
Even before he was appointed postulator – or promoter – of the cause, Cardinal Stella, former prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, was convinced the “smiling pope” was a saint. The former Bishop Albino Luciani of Vittorio Veneto was his bishop from the time he was a seminarian until the bishop was named patriarch of Venice in 1969.
“I knew him up close, and I have beautiful memories of him, his human virtues and his virtues as a priest and bishop,” the cardinal said. “He’s someone I have always carried in my heart.”
But with the canonizations in 2014 of Popes John XXIII and John Paul II and of Pope Paul VI in 2018, people can be forgiven for suspecting that the modern papacy is some kind of fast-track to canonization.
When Pope Francis’ approval of the miracle needed for the beatification of Pope John Paul I was announced Oct. 13, Christopher Bellitto, a professor of history at Kean University in Union, N.J., tweeted a link to a blog he wrote in 2019 raising a series of questions about canonizing popes.
“The way things are going now, it seems to be as automatic to put the prior pope up for sainthood as it was uncommon for hundreds of years,” he said.
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