Abstract
This chapter traces the design of truthfulness and credibility in the two modes of decision-making: bureaucratic procedures and spiritual and liturgical settings that converged in the canonization of an early modern blessed or saint. These procedures were linked with the careful framing or, if necessary, obfuscation of local and clientelistic mechanisms that proved pivotal to the manufacture of saintly personae, but that simultaneously threatened to thwart the universal validity of the papal decision to elevate a person to the honour of the altars, shedding light on the production of truth in early modern Catholicism.
Keywords: canonization, early modern sainthood, Roman Curia, bureaucratic practices, patronage, personnel decision
How do canonizations produce truth, or, put differently, how do they endow assertions and opinions with the status of universal truth? Formally, the truth-finding procedure reviewed in this chapter merely rubber-stamps an already existing reality rather than creating a new one: it ascertains that a person, called to holiness since his or her death decades or centuries ago, is living in God's presence, can therefore serve as an example for the faithful, and can be called upon to assist the living as an intercessor with the Almighty. Through canonization, this pre-existing truth is confirmed, officially declared binding, and liturgically implemented. The ‘new’ saint is then included in the canon of official saints and elevated to the honour of the altars; from then on, she or he may be invoked in the prayers of and venerated by the faithful throughout the entire Church. The outcome of the canonization procedure thus confers official status and validity on an assumption about the sanctity of the person involved; conversely, this decision is effectively truthful to the extent that it meets with general approval or at least acceptance. This chapter examines how the Roman Church produced truth in this sense with an analysis of curial canonization procedures in the early seventeenth century.
Historians have come to value canonization and the cult of saints as an important field of research into the so-called Counter-Reformation. On one hand, the canonization of saints, which came to an abrupt halt in 1523 but was resumed from 1588 onwards, is generally considered a pivotal instrument in the revitalization of the papacy: a new brand of saints provided Christians across the globe with tangible personifications of the post-Tridentine ideal of piety nurtured by the Church.