The Catholic Church never changes yet is always changing. Christian sainthood exemplifies that paradox. Cathy Caridi's study of canonization examines “the almost obsessive concern in the Catholic Church for public, explicit rules and regulations, outlining the requirements for every conceivable aspect of the canonization process” (98). Making Martyrs is descriptive and comparative, centering on Rome's procedures that are kinetic yet rooted in unchanging concepts. Caridi argues that formal procedural changes were necessary and rational, intended initially to safeguard against error and accident, and preferable to Russia's looser situational approach. An introduction and four chapters, endnotes that place observations in their proper context, and a bibliography that includes many lesser-known sources on Russian canonization make that essential case.
Chapter one describes a trait of legal history: with no formal process, what one may call a phenomenology of recognition operated, here with liturgical, devotional, and hierarchical elements. Communities read Acta of martyrs. Fourth-century synods at Carthage and Laodicea forbade assigning martyrdom to suicides and heretics. Saints’ remains were “translated” to churches for veneration. Saints’ Lives were vetted because they were sometimes intended as inspiration but heedless of history. No item, however, constituted a legal “requirement” for sainthood. Bishop Optatus's single use of vindicatus in relation to sainthood does not necessarily mean that formal approval by church authorities was already required in the fourth century (38, 168n75). Nor did the consecration of churches in a person's name constitute formal enactment of what Caridi frequently refers to as “saint-making.”
Chapter two discusses the Church in Russia from the tenth century. The premise is that the Russian Church, at first following “ancient Byzantine rules” (97), gradually added procedures, but did so without strict codification. As names were added to the calendar, factors other than martyrdom, like asceticism or faithful endurance of hardship, played a role. Reports of miracles were significant, but despite the claim (63) that they were required in Russia by the eleventh century, Caridi presents conflicting cases (66 vs. 68–69). Sacred biographies (zhitiia) were important. Questions of “authority,” however, were answered situationally. The lay faithful remained influential: “the Russian church confirms the cult of a saint; it does not institute it,” citing Peeters (73). Conflicting zhitiia and the inclusion of names of saints otherwise unknown brought increased intervention by bishop, patriarch, or synod. Caridi notes that “political factors might have played a role” (96). She concludes, “determining whether one died a martyr's death or one caused by political intrigue can often be an impossible task” (105). Readers may ask whether the categories were always distinct when Russians were beset by Mongols and Tatars.
Chapter three describes Rome's gradual claim of authority over canonization, which gained momentum from a claim of essential rights of approval, at least in one case in the twelfth century, to an insistence in the fifteenth century that the Pope could require other regions to commemorate certain saints, to the introduction in the sixteenth century of the notion that papal approval was required to add any saint to the liturgical calendar (108–109). This concentration of authority away from local bishops and their communities originally sought to address local abuses (128) and was “completely unplanned” (138). ‘Saint-making’ and ‘creation of saints’ thus points to canonization in the Catholic Church becoming an instance of what is regarded as the Pope's infallible act (133). Papal central control reached its procedural limit.
Chapter four highlights the book's distinctive contribution. Through its competent tracing of the procedural history of canonization in Russia and Rome, readers will gain a fuller understanding of the orderly approach taken by the West and may be inclined to avoid simplistic explanations of the increasing papal control as pure power-grabbing. But the chapter also reveals a deficiency, for while theology is beyond its purview, the scant mention of Orthodox theology that remains rooted in the principle of theosis, which is not rule bound, and of saints recognized rather than made, fails to contextualize Russian Orthodoxy's resistance to rule-writing, which Caridi calls “altogether absent from Russian culture” (142). Readers would be well served by a description of the “ancient Byzantine rules” as the canon lawyer understands them. But while there are concepts and procedures that can be described, the reasons for the Orthodox Church's reluctance to engage in Western codification are also part of the legal history of canonization. Those reasons are essential in themselves and valid for all centuries, not merely part of the first millennium's history or only to show a theological and procedural vagueness out of which Russian and Roman practices evolved.
The book is clearly written. There are a few technical errors with Greek. “To martyr” in The Martyrdom of Polycarp 1.1 (13) is not passive in the Greek. Despite the obvious implication of the participle μαρτήρσαντας as “being killed,” the word still means “bearing witness” to faith. Also, Filumena is not “lover of light” (134), as if derived from phil-lumen, but rather the Greek participle φιλουμένη “beloved.” That it is derived from a common attribution does not mean that it was not also a proper name, like Theodore, Catherine, Agnes, and so on.
At the outset, Caridi asked whether reconciliation between Rome and Russia on sainthood is likely. While concluding in the negative on that question, Caridi describes Pope Francis's “bypassing of bureaucracy” to “fast-track” the causes of several candidates for sainthood (140). The author offers this as possibly a suggestion by the Pope that the “excessively legalistic and complicated Catholic canonization procedure has to end” (141). If readers view Pope Francis's unencumbering together with his own observation that “the martyrs of today are greater in number than those of the first centuries” (The Angelus, December 26, 2016), his actions make a situational response to changes in society, yet are still within the matrix of tradition. Few would advocate unprincipled randomness, and all hierarchs work to help guard against error; but the veneration of saints practiced in the East (the cover illustration is of martyr-saint Catherine of Alexandria) may provide the model for a reconciled Church, with the entire community moved by faith in the guidance of the Holy Spirit. More than any degree of procedural complexity, that is a fundamental difference.
