Mini Post #10: Saints' Row
Mini Post #10: Saints' Row
How does the Catholic Church choose its saints?
I’ve been, for around two months, writing something different: a shorter, narrower post focusing on one specific study. Last week, I wrote about whether trains and the telegraph help actual trad wives to make the US ban alcohol. This is the tab with all the previous posts.
Onto the actual question of interest for the post: How does the Catholic Church choose to make people saints?
In Christianity, a Saint is “a person who is recognized as having an exceptional degree of holiness, likeness, or closeness to God”, according to Wikipedia. The specifics vary across branches of Christianity, but normally, it’s expected that a Saint be a significant teacher (in the broad sense) who leads an exemplary life and (usually) performs some holy act of some kind.
In Catholicism in particular, the process to become a Saint is quite lengthy, and is called canonization, which entails multiple large-scale and quite lengthy inquiries. There are broadly speaking two kinds of Saints: martyrs, who die upholding their faith in some way, and confessors. We’ll focus on confessors, and the canonization process for them has two “legs”: first, being beatified, which requires having lived a life of virtue (prosecution, while relevant, is not necessary) and not having been executed, as well as having performed one miracle during your lifetime (it was two before 1983). The second step, after being beatified, is also having to perform a posthumous miracle (not necessarily after beatification), which gets you canonized (i.e., Sainthood). Who gets beatified, and who gets canonized, is chosen by the Pope somewhat arbitrarily, though provided that the person feasibly and somewhat verifiably fulfills all the relevant criteria.
Well, what’s the economics angle here? The paper in question is “Saints Marching In, 1590-2009” (2011) by Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary, and looks at choices in beatification and canonization since roughly the 1590s until the (then) present, with more complete records starting in the 1580s. The process has very unclear data for the first 300 years of canonzations, and was formalized between the year 1000 and 1200, with crystal-clear rules in place by 1917, and changes to them in 1983.
Firstly, the authors compile a list of Popes from that period, as well as a database of all Saints or Beati sorted by region of residence (defined by location of death), time of life, and as many available details of their hagiography as possible. Surprisingly enough, the average beatification rate for Popes from the start of the dataset to the 1980s was around 1 per year, and shot up to 12 for Pope John Paul II and 11 for Pope Benedict Somewhat importantly, and considering that there were only 630 saints by 1980, most Popes added around 0.75 new Saints a year for every existing one, whilst John Paul added 3 and Benedict XVI added 6.
The length of time between death and beatification was of 118 years on average, with a median of 88 years - an experience similar to that under Pope John Paul II (86 years) and Benedict XVI (84 years). However, the time between beatification and canonization shortened considerably, from an average of 41 years (median 29) before 1980 to 48 under John Paul II, and just 19 for Pope Benedict. Demographically, there have been few trends, with male Saints making 50-60% of new canonizations but without significant changes across time, and urban Saints making up 80% of them. For beatifications, around 45% of them were Italians, 33% were other Western Europeans, 7% Eastern European, 7% Latin American, 4% North American, 3% Asian, and 1% African. The percentages are similar for canonizations, and the share from non-Western European saints has been rising since the 1980s.
Then, the authors construct a database of Christian populations across those same regions, broken down between Catholics, Orthodox (a Christian offshoot that broke off from Catholicism in the mid 1000s over a dispute surroudning graven images), Evangelicals (which includes them and Pentecostals) and Protestantism (including Anglicans other types of Protestants, and more marginal groups like Mormons or 7th-Day Adventists). There are many iffy choices here, like interpolating data between years where it is available, holding religious shares constant after 2000, and particularly holding the Evangelical/Protestant ratio constant from before 1900 to 1580 - which is especially weird when Latin America started having explosive growth in Protestant and particularly Evangelical affiliation in that timeframe.
Roughly speaking, in 2000 there were 1.1 billion Catholics, 0.6 billion Non-Evangelical Protestants, 0.2 billion Evangelicals, and 0.2 billion Orthodox. Around 50% of Christians were Catholics, down from 56% in 1580. For Catholics, the largest geographic region is Latin America (44% of the total), followed by Asia and Africa (25%), Western Europe (18%), North America (7%), and Eastern Europe (6%). Meanwhile, Protestantism was, in 2009, 55% Asian + African, 18% North American, 12% Western European, 12% Latin American, and 2% Eastern European.
The analysis in question is beatification rates and canonization rates as randomly occurring as a function of time and the stock of Catholic population, depending on both the Catholic vs Non Catholic share of the population in each region, as well as the population of said region. In general, the results are simple: having more Catholics in a region raises the beatification rate, and having more beatifieds in a region raises the posterior canonization rate. There is no correlation between how many people are Saints at the beginning of a Pope’s tenure and how many people they canonize. The non-Catholic Protestant population has a large and significant positive effect on beatifications and canonizations - i.e., Popes respond to competition by Protestants by increasing the number of people they exalt. These effects are similar, though slightly smaller, for Evangelicals. Meanwhile, there is no effect from Orthodox competition. There is also no effect from the Pope’s age on the number of Saints they induce. And lastly, the beatification rates of Popes Benedict and John Paul II were statistically much higher than of previous Popes, with Benedict also being an outlier in terms of canonizations (John Paul II much less so) - mainly by a drastic shortening of the time between beatification and canonization.
So it seems that Popes respond to growing religious competition by increasing the number of canonizations and beatifications they perform for that given region. At the same time, there is a possibility that the previous two Popes showed decreased standards for canonizations and beatifications than their predecessors. Another option is that it reflects the explosion of the global population, lagged by around 100 years, but this is not tested in the paper. To be somewhat speculative based on national origins, it seems that John Paul II focused on elevating voices from countries in the developing world that were facing competition from Protestantism, while Benedict tried to counteract secularization in traditionally Catholic Countries.
How does the current Pope fit into this? Based on light research, Pope Francis beatified 1,522 people and canonized 912, including multiple Popes, with group canonizationd for martyrs accounting for 846 of them (the 813 Martyrs of Otranto, the 30 Martyrs of Natal, and the 3 Child Martyrs of Tlaxcala), leaving around 66 individuals canonized - so just over six canonizations a year, around half as many as his two predecesors. Taking the final stock of 1081 and considering the large number of people induced as a group, he seems to have a much lower number of new Saints and beati than the two previous Popes, particularly considering his shorter tenure and the larger initial stock of elegible Beati. National origins analysis is beyond my pay grade on this, but it seems that he’s focusing on Latin American individuals most of all, signaling growing interest in combatting the rise of Evangelicalism in the world’s largest Catholic region - for instance, Brazil may soon be surpassed by Mexico as the home of the most Catholics in the world, which is surprising considering that there are roughly 90 million more Brazilians than Mexicans.
To finish the post, some links
The paper in question
A posterior version of the same paper with some further additions
A small excerpt about early Catholics using placebo tests to catch witches