Recent students of the Counter-Reformation in Italy have not neglected the subject of sanctity. For example, one such student, Peter Burke, has dealt with it in a general and theoretical way, while others, such as Gabriella Zarri, have concentrated on certain classes of saints, in her case female saints and beatae. Scholars, however, whose interests are in the particular rather than the general, have tended to prefer to study the lives and times of individual saints, and the perceptions of them by their contemporaries. A different approach altogether has been to study a particular aspect of sanctity, such as hagiography or canonization. Similarly, some scholars have concentrated on the salient aspects of the contribution that particular individuals made to the work of the Church militant, for example church reform in the case of Charles Borromeo or the repression of heresy in that of Michele Ghislieri.

At the time of the Lord Pope Benedict XII [1334-42] it happened that in a city near Avignon in which the [Franciscan] brothers had a convent, on a certain day while all the friars were in the choir celebrating the holy office, two friars belonging to a different order arrived and walked around. Then one of them saw the image of St Francis with the holy stigmata depicted on the wall, [and] he said to his companion: ‘Those friars minor want their saint to be like Christ’. And he took up his knife and said: ‘I want to efface those stigmata from that image so that he [St Francis] does not appear like Christ’. And having said this, he carried out the deed. And when he had expunged the five stigmata, they began to shed blood abundantly. Seeing this, greatly amazed, he said to his companion, ‘Aah! What shall I do?’ His companion replied: ‘You’ve really committed a mortal sin! I advise you to run quickly to a confessor and confess’. He did this. … The confessor counselled him that he should run to the pope and tell him everything about this and receive advice from him about what should be done. … When the pope heard this, he asked him if it was truly thus. The friar declared with an oath that it was thus. Then the pope said: ‘I particularly want to see this miracle’. And when he came to that place, he saw blood flowing abundantly from those holy stigmata in the image. Then, greatly amazed, the pope knelt down in front of the image: [and] raising his hands to heaven he said: ‘St Francis, forgive the sin of this miserable sinner, because I promise to you that I want to institute that the feast of your stigmata should be celebrated, and above all I want to enjoin your friars that throughout the whole order they must solemnly celebrate the feast of your stigmata’. And as soon as the lord pope had made this vow, the blood ceased to flow.

Luigi (Alvise) Gonzaga (1568–91), heir to the principality of Castiglione delle Stiviere, renounced his succession in 1585 to enter the Jesuit novitiate, in the course of which he died of plague, evidently contracted while ministering to the sick. He was beatified with extraordinary rapidity in 1605, four years before Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier. Admittedly the figure of the ‘angelic youth’ Luigi, as presented in the life written by the promoter of the cause for his canonization, Virgilio Cepari, and finally published in 1606, was more conventional and more calculated to seize the popular imagination than the uncharismatic Loyola, who enjoyed a very limited cult initially and was slow to deliver miracles. But, more significantly, the beatification was a matter of dynastic politics: it was promoted not only by the Jesuits but also, and more insistently, by the Gonzaga dynasty, supported by the Holy Roman Emperor and by allied dynasties. A phase of bureaucratization of canonization processes, already under way, was intensified shortly after Luigi’s beatification. Moreover, the criteria for sainthood would seem to have shifted somewhat in the first half of the seventeenth century. Luigi was not canonized until 1726, under Benedict XIII. In 1729 the same pope pronounced him the patron of students in Jesuit educational institutions and apparently also of students more generally. This provided the basis for the cult of Luigi in the nineteenth century as the patron of ‘Catholic youth’, that is both adolescents and young adults. This development was linked to a novel understanding of adolescence as a specific age group and also to the Church’s battle against secularism. Thus the cult acquired a new relevance long after the princely world that had pressured for Luigi’s canonization had passed away. The legal history of canonization processes substantially explains the delay in Luigi’s canonization, but this delay is also partly explicable by the very complexity and ambiguity of Luigi’s image as both child and man, which served in the long term to give ever new life to his cult.

Regional identity in medieval Durham depended crucially on St Cuthbert. The property and privileges of the diocese were presented as possessions of an originally Celtic community which had carried the miraculously incorrupt body of the saint from Lindisfarne to a final home in Durham. Tradition added other holy abbots, bishops and kings, remembered as obedient to the Roman tradition after the Synod of Whitby in 664. The Durham story included the expulsion at the Conquest of married guardians of Cuthbert in favour of proper monks, a change corroborated by miracle stories and holy lives, such as that of Godric in the dependent cell of Finchale. Increasing possessions were given to the saint; miracle stories showed him punishing violators of his shrine. Relics, including the head of King Oswald and remains of Bede, linked the priory with these traditions. These ideas had penetrated the local identity; the notion of the Haliwerfolc, the community of the liberty of St Cuthbert, the lands belonging to the saint, remained strong in the late Middle Ages for people ‘between Tyne and Tees’. Nonetheless, in the 1570s Christopher Watson attempted a history which denigrated Cuthbert’s life and miracles and those of other Durham saints.

Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ was one of many texts produced in the early modern period which portrayed and assessed the Anglo-Saxon Church and its saints. This Protestant antiquarian work fits into a wider tradition in which the medieval past was studied, evaluated and employed in religious polemic. The pre-Reformation Church often played a dual role; as Helen Parish has shown, the institution simultaneously provided Protestant writers with historical proof of Catholicism’s league with the Antichrist, while also offering an outlet through which to trace proto-Protestant resistance, and thereby provide the reformed faith with a past. The Anglo-Saxon era was especially significant in religious polemic; during this time scholars could find documented evidence of England’s successful conversion to Christianity when Pope Gregory the Great sent his missionary, Augustine, to Canterbury. The See of Rome’s irrefutable involvement in the propagation of the faith provided Catholic scholars with compelling evidence which not only proved their Church’s prolonged existence in the land, but also offered historic precedent for England’s subordination to Rome. In contrast, reformed writers engaged in an uneasy relationship with the period. Preferring to locate the nation’s Christian origins in apostolic times, they typically interpreted Gregory’s conversion mission as marking the moment at which Catholic vice began to creep into the land and lay waste to a pure primitive proto-Protestant faith. In order to legitimize the establishment of the Church of England, Catholicism’s English foundations needed to be challenged. Reformers increasingly placed emphasis upon the existence of a proto-Protestant ‘strand’ that predated, but continued to exist within, the Anglo-Saxon Church. Until the Norman Conquest, this Church gradually fell prey to Rome’s encroaching corruption, and enjoyed only a marginal existence prior to the Henrician Reformation in the 1530s. Thus Protestants had a fraught and often ambiguous relationship with the Anglo-Saxon past; they simultaneously sought to trace their own ancestry within it while exposing its many vices. This paper seeks to address one such vice, which was the subject of a principal criticism levied by reformers against their Catholic adversaries: the unfounded creation and veneration of saints. Protestants considered the degree of significance the medieval cult of saints had attached to venerating such individuals as a form of idolatry, and, consequently, the topic found its way into countless Reformation works. However, as this essay argues, reformed attitudes towards sainthood could often be ambivalent. Texts such as Hegge’s prove to be extremely revealing of such ambiguous attitudes: his own relationship with the saints Cuthbert, Oswald and Bede appears indistinct and, in numerous instances, his understanding of sanctity was somewhat contradictory.

Revelations, apparitions, voices, stigmata and ecstasies were extraordinary phenomena and profoundly emotional, in which God was perceived as communicating with human beings through bodily phenomena. It was up to churchmen to regulate and control divine intervention in daily life and separate truth from deceit. But attempting to fulfil this pastoral duty was a complicated matter. Were these experiences authentic, really proceeding from God or were they illusions of the devil, the deceiver par excellence and able to capture human trust? Furthermore, besides the devil’s deceit, might there not also be an element of human simulation or ‘false sanctity’, that is, a mixture of lies and hypocrisy? This was the art of the actor, who makes the audience believe what is untrue. Hypocrites have one sole aim: to obtain praise and fame through the exercise of sham virtues.

During the Middle Ages, the cult of St Winifred was the most important of the many Welsh cults centred on wells. Winifred’s story was recounted in two medieval Lives: the Vita prima by Pseudo-Elerius (c. 1100), written from a Welsh perspective, and the Vita secunda by Robert, prior of Shrewsbury, written after the translation of the saint’s supposed relics to his abbey in 1138. According to these, Winifred (fl. c. 650) was educated by St Beuno in North Wales; and, although she had vowed herself to virginity, she inspired the lust of a local prince, Caradog, who, when repulsed, decapitated her. Where her head fell, a spring erupted; and Beuno restored Winifred to life and killed Caradog with a curse. Winifred subsequently became abbess at Gwytherin and, after her death, the spring’s waters were held to cure the sick miraculously. The spring, at Holywell in Flintshire, attracted countless pilgrims in the later Middle Ages, and Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, encased it in a fine building. At the Reformation, however, the cult of saints was abolished, the Twenty-Second of the Thirty-Nine Articles specifically denouncing their invocation.

The following paper explores the sanctity of the late eighteenth-century High Church Anglican layman, William Stevens (1732—1807), as seen through the eyes of his biographer, Sir James Allan Park (1763–1838). A largely unstudied figure, Stevens, a prosperous London hosier who dedicated most of his adult life to philanthropic, theological and ecclesiastical concerns, arguably represents one of the most important figures within pre-Tractarian High Churchmanship. Park was a close friend of Stevens. A judge of the Common Pleas and a founding member of Stevens’s ‘Club of Nobody’s Friends’, Park shared Stevens’s interest in theology and church-related concerns, even publishing in 1804 a short discourse directed towards young people, on the need for a frequent reception of Holy Communion. In focus here is a facet of Stevens’s life that came to be closely associated with his many achievements as a lay divine and activist within the pre-Tractarian Church of England, namely, his personal sanctity; this was marked by a close connection between faith and works, a strict dedication and devotion to the Church of England’s services and sacraments, and a rejection of’enthusiasm’ in its pejorative sense — all of which he held while maintaining a strong sense of cheerfulness and zeal. A portrait of sanctity that conforms to what is known about pre-Tractarian spirituality, the Memoirs may additionally be viewed as offering a representative understanding of what constituted holiness for this Anglican tradition.

A ‘saint if ever there was one, but who might have been a little more effective had there been in his nature some slight traces of the old Adam’. Thus William Hardy Harwood (1856—1924) reflecting on a past member of Sub Rosa, a long-established essay club for Congregational ministers in Greater London. Harwood could only have known this particular saint for four years and perhaps his recollection is best seen as a businesslike minister’s snapshot of an other-worldliness outside the normal run of Nonconformist experience. It betrays a degree of affectionate irritation. It is almost a dismissal. Free Churchmen don’t do saints.

In September 1790, some six months before his death, John Wesley was pleased to observe in a letter to Robert Carr Brackenbury that an unnamed Methodist, Brother D., ‘has more light with regard to full sanctification’. ‘This doctrine,’ Wesley continued, ‘is the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodists; and for the sake of propagating this chiefly He appeared to have raised us up.’

St Serafim of Sarov (1754–1833), though not widely known among western Christians, is one of the most popular saints in Russia and among Russians abroad. A discussion of his canonization in 1903 cannot avoid mention of some less than savoury aspects and conjuncts of his cult, but let it be said at the outset that nothing which follows changes the fact that he is both a hugely venerable and very attractive figure. Though a monk in a large monastery, he lived for years as a hermit in a neighbouring forest, loving to be unknown; but in the last years of his life, back in his monastery, he welcomed visitors, who queued in their hundreds outside his cell, day after day. A favourite greeting of his to address his visitors was moia radost (my joy). In the words of the synodal decree approving his canonization, ‘Spiritual joy had penetrated the starets so much that he was never seen to be sad or depressed, and this joyful mood of the soul he endeavoured to communicate to others.’ Equally impressive are such episodes in his life as the occasion when robbers beat him up, leaving him half-dead and with a permanent spinal injury: he not only forgave them but insisted they were not prosecuted, threatening that, if they were, he would leave the Sarov region for ever. Nothing I shall say can besmirch Serafim himself or the devotion to his memory of those who see him as a model of piety and an intercessor in time of need. But this does not alter the strange circumstances of his canonization, and it is these, not his sanctity, that are the subject of this paper.

One purpose of canonization, particularly for founders of religious orders, is to present a paradigm for emulation. The legacy of Charles de Foucauld (1858—1916), a Catholic hermit who lived and died in French Algeria as a witness for Christianity to Islam, has been in some dispute. There are nineteen different congregations and associations in the Foucauldian spiritual family, only one of which came to fruition during his lifetime. His beatification in 2005 has sparked a debate about the nature of his vocation, and consequently about which of his characteristics should be emulated. This raises the question of whether he was a monk or a missionary. Careful consideration of his life is an essential prerequisite for answering these questions.

At the time of the death of Sœur Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus (Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin, 2 January 1873 — 30 September 1897) the Carmelite convent of Lisieux was a hidden and poor community, destined to remain as obscure and forgotten as Thérèse herself had been during her nine-year career as a nun. Just twenty-eight years later, Thérèse had been made a saint and the Carmel of Lisieux had become the focus of the attention of the whole Catholic world. There was little remarkable about Thérèse’s short and sheltered life, but she has enjoyed an incredible ‘posthumous life’ through her second career as a saint. The autobiographical writings she produced during her time at the Carmel were published in 1898 as L’Histoire d’une âme (The Story of a Sout) and were an instant success, later becoming a classic of Catholic spirituality. Her canonization in 1925 was the quickest since 1588 at the time, and Pope Pius XI referred to her rapid rise to fame as a ‘storm of glory’, later calling her ‘the star of his pontificate’. Named Patroness of the Missions in 1927, she became Patroness of France, alongside Joan of Arc, immediately after the liberation of France in 1944, and in 1997 Pope John Paul II named her a Doctor of the Church. Only the third woman to earn this title, she became ranked alongside the legendary names of Teresa of Àvila and Catherine of Siena. Since 1994 her relics have been on an almost constant world tour and when they visited Ireland in 2001 the organizers estimated that seventy-five per cent of the total population turned out to venerate them — some 2.9 million people. In September and October 2009 they visited England and Wales, a unique event in the religious history of Britain, which stimulated considerable interest in Thérèse as a historical personality. But while the biographies of Thérèse proliferate, the importance of her posthumous existence for European religious culture continues to be overlooked. This paper looks at the construction of the cult of Thérèse of Lisieux after her death, paying particular attention to the role which the Carmel of Lisieux and its key personalities played in this process, and highlighting the central role played by images and commercial products in the development of the cult.

On 23 February 1984, the bishops of the Anglican Province of Western Australia signed and sealed a document promulgating the Venerable John Ramsden Wollaston a local saint and hero of the Anglican Communion in accordance with Resolutions 77–80 of the Lambeth Conference 1958. These four resolutions had allowed national or provincial Anglican Churches to add to the Calendar of the Saints to permit ‘supplementary commemorations for local use’ according to the following principles where they were extra-scriptural persons. They had to be individuals ‘whose historical character and devotion are beyond doubt’; ‘revisions should be few and without controversy’; and such additions ‘should normally result from a wide-spread desire expressed in the region concerned over a reasonable period of time’.

On 17 October 2010 Mary MacKillop became the first Australian citizen to be officially canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. This event generated a similar outpouring of patriotic enthusiasm to that which greeted Mary’s beatification in 1995. The title of this paper is borrowed from a newspaper article of 1985 by the poet, publisher and self-described ‘implacable agnostic’, Max Harris, a fervent supporter of Mary’s canonization. Saints are the only relatives that you can choose, commented Bishop Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century, and taking this ancient aphorism rather more literally than St Ambrose intended, Dame Edna Everage has claimed descent from a branch of the MacKillop family tree. As Dame Edna’s creator, comedian and satirist Barry Humphries, is a shrewd observer of Australian culture, Mary MacKillop’s triumph as a saint for all Australians seems assured — but what does this reveal about the meaning of sainthood in contemporary Australian society? This paper will trace some important stages in devotion to saints in Australian history before returning to Mary Helen MacKillop, her status as a national icon, and the threads of change and continuity which can be discerned in her cult.

In his much quoted article ‘How to be a Counter-Reformation Saint’, Professor Peter Burke remarks on the ‘crisis of canonisations’ which afflicted the papacy in the middle years of the sixteenth century. That particular crisis, of course, was that there were no canonizations. As the veneration of saints came under attack from the reformers, successive pontiffs thought it politic to refrain from creating yet more. In the long pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II (1978—2005), the longest in papal history apart from that of Pope Pius IX (1846–78) — whom John Paul beatified, along with Pope John XXIII, on 3 September 2000 — there was another crisis of canonizations. In this instance, however, there were, in the eyes of some, far too many of them, devaluing the currency. Even the then Cardinal Josef Ratzinger was heard to utter words of disquiet. Indeed, John Paul’s saint-making policy was a topic almost as much for the secular press as the religious: ‘Catholicism turns to computers as the saints go marching in’ was the headline over a piece in The Sunday Times.