One of the subjects of the Catholic Church's canon law which regularly elicits great interest, even fascination, is the process of beatification and canonisation. As Msgr Robert Sarno of the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of the Saints quips, ‘the saints have two “eyes” (“I”s): one for intercession, and the other for imitation’. The process in the Catholic Church has undergone significant change over the centuries: originally the process was organised on a local level, but when, in the twelfth century, a diocese granted the honours of the altar to a cleric who died fighting in what was basically a bar-room brawl, the Roman Church reacted by reserving all cases to itself; this was formalised in the decree of Alexander III (X 3.45, c 1 Audivimus (1173)). While there have been occasional exceptions, canonisations in the Catholic Church have normatively taken place since then according to procedures put into place from time to time by papal authority. The current norms were promulgated with the apostolic constitution Divinus perfectionis magister of John Paul II (1983), and have been clarified and modified more recently by the instruction Sanctorum Mater (2007). Other churches, particularly the Orthodox, have their own means for authorising the veneration of saints, although their procedures came into being much later than those of the Catholic Church. The only person ‘canonised’ as a martyr within Anglicanism has been Charles I, by the two Convocations at the Restoration in 1660. The study of the process of canonisation is traditionally divided into historical, theological and canonical areas; the most complete reference manual remains Le cause dei santi (second edition, Rome, 2014).

Cathy Caridi seeks to compare and contrast the juridical processes of canonisation in the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church. Her presentation is largely historical and tends to be anecdotal, although one cannot eliminate the theological completely, and the canonical processes are somewhat glossed over. Citations of the massive, monumental De servorum Dei et beatorum canonizatione of Prospero Lambertini (an official of the congregation of the Roman Curia responsible for canonisations, who later became Benedict XIV) – five thick volumes in the modern edition of this work have been published in the last ten years, and the project is only about half-completed – are economical, and emphasis appears to be placed more on the exceptions than on the norms. Events described as ‘rare’ (such as Pope Francis' dispensation from the miracle needed for the canonisation of his predecessor John XXIII) are indeed exceptional, but not unusual (compare John Paul II's dispensation from a miracle in the case of John of Fiesole (Fra Angelico): the Pope simply declared that ‘his art is his miracle!’). This is likewise the case with ‘equipollent canonisation’ (where a long-standing cultus is recognised by decree, without submitting it to the full, formal process): while it is unusual, by definition, it is not rare or unheard of.

The question of whether one church may recognise saints canonised by another church, on which Caridi spends a fair amount of time, overlooks the basic principle that churches canonise their own members, and it would seem to be an act of hubris for, say, the Catholic Church to canonise a non-Catholic (particularly one who belonged to a church which had its own canonisation process). Caridi takes sides in a variety of ecclesiastical battles, sometimes explicitly but frequently unacknowledged, and for those who are unaware of the fault lines this can be frustrating. One of the main fault lines in this area is that of infallibility, which Caridi deals with tangentially in her discussion of whether someone can be ‘decanonised’. While it appears that this has happened in at least one case in the Russian Orthodox Church, it has never happened in the Catholic Church, at least in part because the majority opinion within the Catholic Church holds that canonisation is an exercise of the infallible ordinary magisterium of the Church, and thus not subject to error; in the Doctrinal Commentary attached to John Paul II's apostolic letter Ad tuendam fidem (18 May 1998), the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared that the ‘dogmatic facts’ in the canonisations of saints were ‘truths connected to revelation by historical necessity and … are to be held definitively, but are not able to be declared as divinely revealed’.Footnote ¹ Caridi's statement that theological matters are ‘beyond the scope of this work’ separates matters (the theological and the legal) that I am not sure can be separated.

The structures of the Russian Orthodox Church have undergone major changes in the past millennium, and especially the past century; the procedures have changed as well. From simply the composition of liturgical texts for a commemoration (as in the case of the eleventh-century martyrs Boris and Gleb), the process has become much more juridical. Of particular interest is Caridi's discussion of the canonisation of Nicholas II and his family, and how the Russian Orthodox Church went to great lengths to show that they were not being canonised for ideological or political reasons. Caridi several times refers to the prospect of Catholic–Orthodox corporate reunion, which she seems to see as just around the corner, and refers to the mutual excommunications of 1054 as a definitive break between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Prescinding from the question of what exactly the status of the Russian Orthodox Church was in 1054, most historians would not see the anathemas of 1054 as a definitive break, and most canonists would not see Catholic–Orthodox reunion as imminent.

Which raises a final question: why are saints canonised when they are? There are thousands of the faithful whose causes have been introduced, at one level or another, and, despite the astronomical increase in canonisations under John Paul II (who canonised more saints and blesseds than all of his predecessors combined), the vast majority of these will never be canonised. This is not because they are not saints, much less because they are not in heaven, but simply because canonisations occur in order to highlight specific values (that is, because these particular people have special value for imitation or intercession). And this is, inevitably, caught up in politics: to take the case of saints canonised in the twentieth century, there are clear political reasons (both secular and ecclesiastical) why Joan of Arc was canonised in 1920, 500 years after her cause was introduced, and why Thomas More and John Cardinal Fisher were canonised in 1935, 400 years after their executions. It is also significant that, while More and Fisher are classed as martyrs, Joan is not. The lightning speed with which John Paul II himself was canonised occasioned significant comment. I would have liked to see more discussion of the cultural, and even secular, pressures on both historical and contemporary canonisation processes.