How to make a saint: The politics of sainthood

On the evening of 24th March 1980, Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador in Central America, was shot with a single high-velocity round while saying mass, the first archbishop to be killed at the altar since Thomas Beckett was cut down by Henry II’s knights in 1170.

His clothes—including his bloodied surplice—were preserved in his modest rooms nearby, and the place quickly became a shrine. People from all over the Americas came to pray, and the building was soon covered with tablets inscribed with “thanks to Monsignor Romero for a miracle granted”.

But by 2008 the clothes had begun to decay in El Salvador’s unforgiving climate, so the local church sent them to Britain for preservation work.

Jan Graffius, the curator at the Catholic boarding school Stonyhurst, recorded a surprising discovery when she examined them; the trousers the archbishop had been wearing when he died showed “white marks around the knees”. She assumed they were mould or mildew, “and then I realised they were salt crystal stains, sweat.”

Her explanation reflects Catholicism’s fascination with the remains of holy men and women. Those who witnessed Romero’s assassination testified that he looked up in time to see his killer; “he flinched”, says Graffius, “and then he went on with the mass, knowing that in the next few seconds he was going to be shot”.

His trousers, she claims, evoke that moment; “he just sweated profusely, and the physical stains of the sweat are a very permanent reminder of his bravery, and also his human reaction to the fact that he was about to die, and that’s terribly moving and I think [it’s] very important that that be preserved”.

The Church’s determination to preserve relics threw up an unexpected problem in relation to another modern candidate for sainthood, the 19th century convert and theologian John Henry Newman.

Newman lived his last years at the Oratory, the religious community he established in Birmingham, and he was buried in a rural area just outside the city.

In 2008 the English Catholic Church decided to move his remains to the Oratory for veneration. But when his grave was opened his body had disappeared—nothing but the “coffin furniture” survived.  The Church put this down to the soil conditions, but there were—unsurprisingly—plenty of sceptics and conspiracy theorists who thought otherwise.

Newman and Romero were very different men—the first an Oxford scholar who spent his life thinking and writing, the second a firebrand orator and champion of Latin America’s poor—but their journeys to sainthood were made over a similar period, and their stories reflect an important fact about the way the Vatican chooses its saints.

There is, alongside all that fervour for relics, a good dose of politics at play. 

Newman, for example, made the grade even though he was, in many ways, a most unsuitable saint.

Before he could be declared Blessed—the final stage before full sainthood—he needed a miracle, and the evidence of his own writings suggests he did not really believe in miracles. He argued that events that had been judged miraculous in earlier, less scientifically advanced times might in fact have been natural phenomena.

Yet the Vatican happily credited Newman with a miracle which many observers considered, to put it mildly, doubtful. In 2000 Jack Sullivan, a Bostonian in his seventies, declared that his acute back pain had disappeared after he prayed to Newman.

After a while the pain returned, and Mr Sullivan underwent surgery the following year. He again prayed to Newman, and reported a “tingling feeling all over”, following which his pain disappeared for good. 

It was enough to get Newman over the line; in September 2009, during his visit to Britain, Pope Benedict XVI beatified him before thousands of people in Birmingham’s Cofton Park.

Some observers, particularly in the Anglican Church, saw a powerplay at work. The Cofton Park event took place at a time when some Anglican clergy were considering conversion to Catholicism over the issue of women’s ordination.

Newman was probably the most famous convert of the 19th century, scandalising Victorian Britain when he left the Church of England. By beatifying him with so much hoopla (it was the first time a pope had presided over a beatification on English soil) Benedict could offer him as a model to follow.

Romero’s story, by contrast, is of an obviously brave and holy man whose reputation got caught up in Vatican controversy.

When he was chosen to lead the Church in El Salvador in 1977 he was widely regarded as a conservative priest who would keep out of politics, and his appointment was welcomed by the government, the military and the country’s landowners.

But very soon afterwards his close friend Fr Rutilio Grande, a prominent campaigner in defence of the poor, was murdered by a death squad. It had a profound impact on Romero, and he began to deliver the powerful sermons which eventually cost him his life.

Local people immediately treated him as a saint—praying to him and asking for his help. The Vatican, however, was at the time preoccupied with a broader debate about what is known as “Liberation Theology”, the conviction that because the Gospel dictates a “preferential option for the poor”, priests have licence to get involved in left-wing politics.

Under both Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict, Romero’s journey towards canonisation made painfully slow process.

All that changed when Pope Francis was elected, and, again, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that politics played a part. Romero is just the kind of leader Francis wants in what he calls “a poor church for the poor”. He very quickly declared there were “no doctrinal problems” in making Romero a saint.

Oscar Romero was formally canonised in October 2018. Newman completed the final stage of his journey to the altars a year—almost to the day—later.