Who Are the Catholic Saints?

In the broadest sense, anyone in heaven — which the Church holds is a very large number of people, the overwhelming majority of them unknown. This is what the feast of All Saints on 1 November commemorates: not the canonised list, but everyone who is not on it.

Canonised saints are the subset the Church has formally investigated and named. The claim being made is narrow and worth stating precisely. Canonisation does not make someone holy, does not reward them, and does not add anything to their situation. It asserts that this particular person is certainly with God, and permits public veneration — a feast day, a church dedicated to them, their name given at baptism or confirmation.

The point of naming them is instructional. Christianity claims that a specific kind of life is possible, and abstract claims about holiness are easy to disbelieve. A canonised saint is a worked example: a real person, in a datable century, under recorded conditions, who lived it. Their variety is part of the argument — the list includes teenagers, kings, labourers, slaves, scholars, soldiers and more than a few former sceptics.

The process is deliberately slow and adversarial, and it is run by the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints in Rome.

It normally begins no earlier than five years after death — a waiting period designed to let enthusiasm subside, though a pope can waive it. The local bishop opens an investigation, and the candidate becomes a Servant of God. Everything they wrote is examined, witnesses are interviewed, and the case is assembled.

If Rome judges that the person practised virtue to a heroic degree, they are declared Venerable. Beatification follows, which requires a verified miracle attributed to their intercession — reviewed first by a medical board and then by theologians, with natural explanations to be excluded. A martyr is exempt from this stage, on the grounds that dying for the faith is its own proof. The person is then called Blessed, with veneration permitted locally.

Canonisation requires a second confirmed miracle and extends veneration to the whole Church.

The historical role popularly known as the "devil's advocate" — an official appointed to argue against the cause — was reformed in 1983, though the adversarial review it embodied still exists in the process.

No, and the distinction is not a modern evasion — it has technical vocabulary going back to the early Church. Latria is worship, and belongs to God alone; giving it to any creature is idolatry, which Catholic teaching condemns as gravely sinful. Dulia is honour given to a creature for God's sake. Hyperdulia is the higher honour given to Mary, and remains categorically different from worship rather than a degree of it.

The underlying practice is simpler than the terminology. Most Christians accept asking a living friend to pray for them. Catholic teaching holds that the friend's death does not end the friendship or the capacity — those in heaven are more alive, not less — so the request is the same request. This is what the Creed means by the communion of saints.

Two clarifications that head off most of the objection. Catholics do not believe saints grant anything; they ask, exactly as any intercessor does. And statues and images are teaching aids and reminders, not objects of veneration in themselves — the point argued out and settled at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787.

Relics are physical remains or objects associated with a saint, classified in three grades: the body itself, something the saint owned or used, and something touched to either of the first two. Their use rests on the conviction that matter can carry grace — the same instinct behind the sacraments — and on the early Church's habit of celebrating the Eucharist over the tombs of martyrs, which is why relics are still placed in altars. The Church prohibits their sale absolutely.

Patron saints attach a saint to a place, occupation, illness or circumstance, usually through something in their life — Luke the physician for doctors, Thomas More the lawyer for statesmen and politicians. Patronage is custom rather than doctrine, and some of it is recent or frankly whimsical.

Feast days are usually the date of death, understood as the day of birth into eternal life. They are how saints enter the liturgical calendar and, historically, how ordinary people kept time at all.

A much smaller group than the saints — more than three dozen in total — singled out for the enduring theological value of their writing. The requirements are three: canonised sanctity, outstanding doctrine, and formal declaration by a pope or council.

They are not a committee and did not agree with each other. Augustine (d. 430) shaped Western thinking on grace, sin and the interior life. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) built the great synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy that still supplies much of the Church's technical vocabulary. Jerome (d. 420) translated the Bible into Latin. Athanasius (d. 373) spent decades and five exiles defending the divinity of Christ against an empire that had largely abandoned it.

Four women hold the title. Teresa of Ávila and Catherine of Siena were declared in 1970, the first to be named; Thérèse of Lisieux in 1997; Hildegard of Bingen in 2012.

The list keeps growing, which is the point — the Church treats theological development as continuing rather than closed.

Mary occupies a category of her own, and the Church has defined four things about her that are held as dogma rather than opinion.

Mother of God — in Greek Theotokos, "God-bearer" — was defined at the Council of Ephesus in 431. The title is a statement about Christ before it is one about Mary: if Jesus is God, and Mary is his mother, the alternative title concedes that he was something less.

Perpetual virginity is affirmed before, during and after the birth of Christ, and was held by the early Church and by the major Reformers alike.

The Immaculate Conception, defined by Pius IX in 1854, holds that Mary was preserved from original sin from the moment of her own conception — by the grace of Christ, applied in anticipation. It is frequently confused with the virgin birth; it concerns Mary's conception, not Jesus'.

The Assumption, defined by Pius XII in 1950, holds that she was taken body and soul into heaven at the end of her earthly life.

The Catechism's own summary is that everything said about Mary derives from Christ and points back to him.