Can John Paul II’s sainthood be cancelled?
The editors of the National Catholic Reporter have asked that the cult of John Paul II be suppressed for his role in the appointment of Theodore McCarrick to be Archbishop of Washington, DC. This comes in the light of the “McCarrick report” last week.
Some people think that the Church’s canonizations are infallible acts, declaring infallibly that the canonized is a saint in heaven. In which case, what the NCR editors are asking would be impossible.
But that’s not actually the Church’s teaching. It is possible to remove a canonized saint’s public cult. However, the NCR editors haven’t come close to making that case. (Deep dive below the break.)
Infallibility only applies to matters that are part of the deposit of faith or directly implied by the deposit of faith. Cardinal Avery Dulles, in his book Magisterium (p. 78), points out that whether or not such-and-such a person who lived after the death of the last apostle is in heaven--that’s not in either category. He then cites the conclusion of a Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue (in which he had participated):
32. The theological manuals of recent generations rather commonly hold that solemn canonizations of saints, as contained in papal decretal letters, are infallible. The tradition in favor of infallibility in the matter has been traced back at least to the time of Thomas Aquinas, but there are genuine difficulties in seeing how canonizations fall within the object of papal infallibility as taught by Vatican I or Vatican II. Certainly, the virtues of particular persons of postbiblical times, and their present situation before God, can scarcely be reckoned as part of the apostolic deposit of faith. If one looks on revelation as having become complete in Christ, holiness may reasonably be seen as a concrete way of living, in a given culture, the saving truth revealed in Christ. The Church has the power to recognize authentic Christian holiness, yet canonization would not seem of its nature to convey infallible certitude that the holiness in question was actually present in the life of this or that historical person.
Here are the relevant parts of Vatican I and II on the “object of infallibility”: Vatican I’s Dei Filius ch. 4, par.13
“For, the doctrine of faith which God revealed... has been entrusted as a divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted”
and Pastor Aeternus, ch. 4, par.6
“For the Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter that by His revelation they might make known new doctrine, but that by His assistance they might inviolably keep and faithfully expound the Revelation, the Deposit of Faith, delivered through the Apostles”;
and most importantly Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium #25:
“This infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer willed His Church to be endowed in defining doctrine of faith and morals, extends as far as the deposit of Revelation extends, which must be religiously guarded and faithfully expounded.”
In an excellent article in Nova et Vetera 17:3, William Diem, after surveying the theological tradition, concludes that canonizations hold a middle position between merely disciplinary/liturgical decrees and infallible teaching. The Church infallibly declares that, based on what we know about a person’s moral life and about the miracles attributed to that person’s intercession, the canonized person is a saint deserving of a public cult. The infallibility extends to what’s publicly known--assuming that there’s nothing we don’t know that would change the answer, what we do know establishes that this person’s life is worthy of imitation and is an example of what has been handed down about holiness from the deposit of faith. For instance, you can’t point to the penitential practices of a canonized saint and say, “this guy is not holy because of his penitential practices.” Saint Bonaventure, in defending the Franciscan view of poverty, pointed out that saints in the past had been canonized while publicly taking vows of poverty, and so taking vows of poverty was infallibly declared by the Church to be compatible with holiness.
However, if there’s something not publicly known about the person (some secret sin) or if the witnesses to either the miracles or the moral life of the canonized are in some way mistaken, then the canonized person might not actually be in heaven. If the canonized is in heaven, then asking for his or her intercession makes abundant sense. If the canonized not in heaven, then our prayers for intercession are misdirected, and a public cult is not in order.
It’s that last part which (if we’re charitably assuming the NCR editors are theologically on top of the status questionis) gives their argument some purchase. So, is there anything that we learned in the McCarrick Report that 1) was not publicly known about Pope John Paul II at the time of his canonization and that 2) disqualifies him from being in heaven? I don’t think so, for more or less the reasons that George Weigel outlines here: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/11/theodore-mccarrick-not-john-paul-ii-is-the-story-of-the-mccarrick-report
The report on pp. 149-192, goes into detail about what was being said about then Archbishop McCarrick before his appointment to DC. Basically, nobody had anything more than rumors about any sexual impropriety. Nothing was on the record. Cardinal John O’Connor of New York desperately didn’t want McCarrick to succeed him as Archbishop, and so his passing along the rumors to the Pope was probably discounted for the reason that he wasn’t objective about McCarrick for other reasons. The reports says (p. 179 fn 593) that it was important to the pope that the Archbishop of Washington be politically savvy, which McCarrick was, and it seems that was his major qualification for the post. Major figures in the Church investigated McCarrick’s moral life and didn’t find anything to disqualify him, and told the Pope that. The report says (p. 173 fn 580) that the pope believed that people often used rumors of sexual misconduct to discredit figures in the Church--indeed the Communists in Poland tried to discredit him by planting evidence of an affair in his apartment. In the US, Cardinal Joseph Bernadin of Chicago was falsely accused of sexual abuse--the putative victim later recanted.
Since John Paul II didn’t have anything more than rumors to discredit McCarrick, rumors that his own experience told him not to trust, he eventually decided to appoint him. Since the rumors about McCarrick had already been investigated, it was decided that they didn’t need to be investigated again. That last, procedural decision not to repeat the work already done by others, is what the NCR editors think means that John Paul II isn’t in heaven. As if not doing redundant paperwork is a mortal sin.
To be fair to their editorial, what they are insinuating is that the procedural decision reveals something that was not known at the time of the canonization: that John Paul II didn’t care about the sexual abuse of minors: “John Paul, in many ways an admirable man, was willfully blind to the abuse of children and young people.” In which case, not de-canonizing him would be an infallible declaration that the Church doesn’t care about the abuse of minors! But that’s pretty thin, for at least three reasons: 1) The report explicitly undermines their uncharitable interpretation by providing context; 2) the pope did take action against clerical abuse when he grasped the scope of the problem; and 3) John Paul II’s handling of the sex abuse crisis was something already known and discussed before his canonization.
If Thomas Aquinas is right that it’s an act of piety to trust the Church’s canonizations (pie credendum est), the NCR editorial is, simply put, impious.
