Canonizations and infallibility. (News in Brief).

Recently the Catholic weekly out of London, England, The Tablet, carried correspondence in its letters column about the authority behind canonizations. A professor David Brading contended that a canonization should be regarded as an exercise of Papal Infallibility (after all, the Pope declares that person to be a saint and in heaven). In response, two letters in The Tablet of March 2 opposed this view. An Oxford professor, Sir Michael Dummett, argued that what can be infallibly defined as being of faith can only be something that has been divinely revealed. Canonization, he said, is in fact a liturgical authorization of the celebration of the feast of the new saint. Any tendency to represent it as an infallible declaration is a doctrinally indefensible instance of "creeping" infallibility.

Father Richard McBrien of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana the well-known dissenter, wrote that the theological opinion that canonizations are infallible is not a doctrine. When the Pope revised the procedures for canonization in 1983, McBrien said, he made no claim that the canonization process is protected by the charism of infallibility. As Canon 749.3 points Out, "No doctrine is understood to be infallibly defined unless it is clearly established as such." Moreover, McBrien continued, some of the greatest saints were proclaimed as such in the first millennium, long before the Popes became involved in the process." Some of these Popes occasionally canonized spiritually dubious candidates," he argued, "which throws the claim to infallibility into even greater doubt."

McBrien went still further in reflecting on the forthcoming canonization of Juan Diego. Are we sure, he asked, whether he ever actually existed? "To take Professor Binding's point, Juan Diego will not be the first person raised to sainthood whose very historical existence has been subject to challenge."

In response, Hugh Ballantyne of Fergus, Ontario, wrote in to explain that the opinion of theologians was exactly the opposite of what Dummett and McBrien believe: "Aquinas, Suarez, and Bellarmine all taught that canonization is infallible." Ballantyne quoted the New Catholic Encyclopedia as declaring that "it is now theologically certain that the solemn canonization of a saint is an infallible and irrevocable decision of the Supreme Pontiff."

In illustration he quoted the words by John Paul II at the canonization of Edith Stein: "By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we declare and define that Blessed Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein, is a saint." That, Ballantyne said, is the clear language of infallibility.

One may add that no "spurious" candidates have been canonized. The lack of written documentation does not prove that Saint Agnes and other early saints never existed.