CANONISATION OF SAINTS IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
Psychoanalyst circles take about splitting. Splitting happens when you see how you are a mixture of bad and good and you hate being both at the one time for it makes you question the good you do and the rewards its brings. You feel you are a fraud. So what do you do? You split the bad elements in your character off the good ones. But they are still real. You cannot deny that. So you just start to see other people has having them not you. So you condemn somebody's immoral sex life for it is what you want to do. You refuse to see that you are as bad and you just project it on to them.
What happens is you end up not seeing your own faults. The corruption in you thrives for you are not dealing with it but projecting it to others. You end up smug and superior.
Canonisation is what you get when a religion is splitting! The saint becomes a model for the righteous and a warning against the unrighteous. The saint is both hero and weapon.
The result is an exaggerated sense of one’s own virtue and innocence, but an
equally exaggerated sense of the selfishness and corruption of others.The Roman
Catholic Church says that our devotion should be for God alone. Yet it lets us
honour our family and the priests and the saints. It is taught that the saints
are special friends of God who are permanently in Heaven, where he lives, and
they will enjoy him in moral perfection and holiness forever.
You can honour the saints without praying to them. The Church says that you can
pray to these people so that they may pray for you. They are thought to have the
power to influence God.
The Church says that canonisation is adding a person to the list of saints - the
list of those the Church believes are in Heaven. The Church does not think that
only those in the list are saints. There are saints who are not listed and who
may never be listed.
The person to be canonised has to be prayed to and do a miracle to let the
Church know he or she is in Heaven. A miracle is something that is not naturally
explicable - eg a dead person coming back to life without medical intervention
after three days. The Church thinks God does the miracle at the saint's request
so that the Church will be able to present the person as an example of holiness
to the Church and as a saint deserving of veneration.
That is very presumptuous. It contradicts Jesus' command not to test
the Lord your God. It contradicts the notion that God has mysterious ways
for we are not privy to his plans and cannot think like he does and know as he
knows. If the miracle proves the person is in Heaven it does not prove the
person was a saint for what if the person was purified in purgatory and then
went to Heaven? And what if a prayer to a false saint is passed on to a
real one or a real one deals with your request? You never really know who
got God to answer the prayer. Maybe God just answered it anyway though it
was addressed to a dummy saint. Plus God is said to listen if a prayer
from a soul in purgatory is made for you. Plus miracles for canonisation
are always cures but medical science is aware that equally or even more
remarkable recoveries happen without any religious element. Not only is
the Church trying to test God but manipulate his evidence. Demons or at
least paranormal entities could be doing the miracles when they are not as godly
as they look. For that reason a miracle cure that happens after a prayer to a
saint for a miracle healing or any kind of healing does not mean the prayer had
anything to do with it. The argument that a miracle healing when a healing
was asked for not a miracle one is a response to prayer makes no sense.
Religion has to pretend that prayers for healing can result in miracles for it
does not want to encourage people to pray for miracles for it will get into
trouble and so will they.
The Catholics pray to the saints and sing hymns of praise to them. This is based
on the notion of the communion of saints. The saints in Heaven and the members
of the Church on earth are connected together through God's presence so that
they are aware of each others needs and willing to help.
Praying to the saints is the same as pagans praying to inferior gods, gods who
are below the top gods. The Catholic claim that the saints are not gods does not
ring true. They claim that they pray not to a saint but through a saint. But if
it is really just a way of praying to God, then it follows that you cannot say
the saints prove their sainthood by getting God to do miracles. It would follow
that the miracle happens because God is honoured and not the saint.
The Catholic Church checks out people proposed for canonisation and if they are
proved worthy and miracles are done after their death through their intercession
it will beatify them – give them the title blessed - and then maybe canonise
them when they get the title Saint. Reasons for Hope, chapter 3, explains that
the Church does all this to be as sure as possible before making a person a
saint.
"The canonisation of saints, that is, the final judgement that a member of the
Church has been assumed into eternal bliss and may be the object of general
vernation. The veneration shown to the saints is, as St. Thomas teaches, “to a
certain extent a confession of the faith, in which we believe in the glory of
the saints” (Quodl. 9, 16) Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. It is in
fact best seen as proclaiming a person to be the faith in person.
St Alphonsus believed that it was heresy to say that anybody canonised by the
Church could be canonised in error (page 23, The Great Means of Salvation and of
Perfection). Many top theologians argued that it was next door to heresy to
doubt the validity of any canonisation. This is nonsense because if the Church
can be split by having two or more plausible claimants to the papacy why
couldn’t it get canonisations wrong for they are not that important? Also as for
the miracles St Vincent Ferrer who was the most famous miracle worker of all
time and allegedly the most powerful miracle worker ever was in fact a member of
the excommunicated rival Roman Catholic Church led by anti-pope Clement VII in
opposition to the faction that Rome recognises as the true Roman Catholic
Church. The man the Church believes was the true pope, Urban VI excommunicated
his rivals supporters as schismatics, excluded from the true Church, and the
Catholic Church still has the nerve to say that miracles only happen in the true
Church and show us who the true saints are! Vincent’s miracles were intended to
draw people into the false Church.
Some Catholics may disagree but to disagree is to deny that the true Church
alone matters. Roman Catholicism claims that the true Church matters above all
things for it is the pillar of the truth and protected by God from error and is
the only Church that can be trusted for it is the only authorised way provided
by God for getting one into heaven.
The Roman Catholic Church believes that we should pray to the saints in Heaven.
They say that this is just asking a saint to pray to God for you so you are
really praying to God. That is a lie for what do they want the saint for then?
Do you ask the doctor’s mother for a prescription? The idea is that the saint
has a better chance of influencing God than you have. God will only do something
if it is for the best but here we are told he can do it not because it is best
but because a saint asked him. This is blasphemy. The saints are really demons
and stronger than God if they can talk him into doing wrong. If you think you
are not good enough to approach God and have to go to a saint then your prayer
must be good enough when the saint listens to it so God should listen to it. The
Virgin Mary is reputedly the greatest of the saints and the most powerful. When
morality is what is best how can it be moral to pray to a lesser saint?
When you honour the Roman Catholic Mary it is not her you intend to honour but a
power that is over God - a demon would accept this adoration for they want you
to think of them as better than God.
This tells us that the practice of waiting until a candidate for sainthood does
miracles which are verifiable before canonising is foolishness because these
miracles could only proceed from the Devil or overactive papal imagination. When
Mary is the best saint there is no point in canonising any others.
The Church allows praying to people to test them if they are saints but what if
they are in Hell?
The Bible calls all Christians saints. The Catholic practice of canonisation
seems ridiculous. The saint has to do miracles before the Church will canonise.
But the recipients pray principally to Christ and invoke canonised saints and so
one wonders how they can be so sure the miracle commands the person be
canonised. The saints liked to hide their virtue and would have despised the
idea of doing miracles to get canonised. When they hid it how can one be sure
they had virtue? If a miracle verified a false saint the miracle would be
regarded as satanic so the process of saint making is riddled with inconsistency
and is all just superstition and bad logic at the end of the day. It is weird
how the Church relies on memories about saints and their motives – a notoriously
unreliable method of being sure they were outstandingly holy and then canonises
them if somebody reports a miracle after praying to them as if that was the only
possible saint they prayed to? What about the persons who prayed for them in the
name of other might-be saints or canonised saints? The Church believes what it
wants!
No matter how good a person is, they have almost no chance of being canonised
unless they do a miracle after they are dead. So why bother investigating a
person’s life then? Why not just worry about the miracle instead? It is bizarre
how many in the Church say that the pope cannot err when he makes a saint and
they agree that the miracle can be disputed with good reason. The Church says it
cannot add to the gospel so the miracles are not essential for belief.
Miracles are supposed to confirm the true religion revealed by God. The Church
claims that to confirm a true Catholic as a saint by the power of miracle is to
indirectly confirm Catholicism as the true faith. The prime confirmation is
given to the person who experiences a miracle or whose prayer results in one. If
somebody who sees prayer as prayer to men and women more than to God and a
miracle happens when they pray to somebody who is not yet canonised but for whom
a movement for canonisation is in vogue then it follows that this is confirming
that person's belief that saints are better than God. Though saint worship does
imply that saints are better than God the Church officially cannot accept such a
position. So the miracle is confirming a belief that is against Catholicism's
official teaching. The Church never checks things like that out. It prefers to
encourage the hasty and superficial assumption made by Catholics that the
miracle is confirming true correct Catholicism. The Church only uses miracles to
trick people into accepting the Catholic faith and to make them fear the fires
of Hell which is reserved for those who disobey the faith and who refuse to join
it.
St Maximilian Kolbe, a priest who offered his life to save a married man from
death under the Nazis and who was then executed, was canonised without doing any
miracles. The Church said that his life was miracle enough.
A person who failed to do any miracles when they were alive should not be
canonised for after death there is no way to be sure it was a miracle or whose
intercession or even what was responsible.
Many of the canonised saints were rabid anti-Semites and had visions that the
Church never accepted as real and even rejected. Many engaged in savage
self-abuse like St Mary Maddalena De Pazzi and St Margaret Mary Alacoque who
reported visions about the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Church says that their
sanctity is provable regardless of their error. But the more sensible a saint is
the more likely they really are sainted. Their sanctity cannot be proved when
their crimes are interpreted as errors. Saints are an argument for the holiness
of the Catholic Church. But if deluded people who mean to be sincere Catholics
but who are really heretics can be saints this is impossible so there should be
Protestant saints.
The canonised saints were mostly renowned when they were alive for the strength
of their prayers and how they could get God to do miracles for people. These
miracles imply that the saint heretically believes that he or she is so
righteous that God blesses through her or him. This is heresy for the Bible
forbids such pride. This makes the miracles demonic.
The Church ignores the fact that most of the canonised saints moaned day and
night about how evil and sinfully vile they were. The Church puts this down to
them seeing even the slightest sin as serious though not as mortal sin. But if
you have attained a tremendous level of sanctity it follows that your sins are
worse than they would be if an ordinary person committed them for you are
desecrating that sanctity and have less excuse for sin. The rebellion is very
serious and it is hard to see how it could not be mortal sin. It comes down to
intention. If you see your “tiny” sins as huge and very serious then they are
serious sins. It is a mortal sin to inflict depression on yourself therefore
when you know that you will react very strongly if you commit a sin then the sin
is mortal because of that. The saints should not have been canonised at all.
Today saints who have not been donor card carriers are canonised. Their organs
go to waste when they could save up to seven lives. Obviously though the Church
has the nerve to protest against contraception in the name of respecting human
life, it doesn't care about it except when sex is involved.
Canonising saints has more to do with promoting their fanatical obedience to the
Vatican than anything else. They are used as political items. They are good
propaganda and so are set up to function as Catholic exemplars with their
subservience to the Vatican. The Church forces the title on the saints whether
they want it or not without concern for what they want for it is herself alone
that she cares about.