Trends in Papal Sainthood

 This is a busy week.  Rehearsals for the production of Clue I am directing moving into the blocking phase, so I will literally be telling everyone where to go tonight.  On Friday we're driving out to Cincinnati to finalize a Rookwood Pottery order for tile as part of the Great Bathroom Remodel.  Work is busy, since electricity rates in Europe have gone up by factors of up to 10x, and that means it's necessary to adjust prices. 

But I started out the week with a fun project for The Pillar on papal sainthood. On Sunday, September 4th, Pope Francis celebrated the beatification of Pope John Paul I.  If he is eventually canonized, John Paul I will form a string of four consecutive papal saints with John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II.  The question I was asked to write on is: how historically unprecedented is that?

It turns out that the last string of four consecutive papal saints ended in 530 A.D. with St. Felix IV. But that's nothing to the string of 35 consecutive papal saints from St. Peter until Pope Liberius broke the streak (although he's considered a saint in the East.) After Liberius was another string of 13 consecutive papal saints.

You can read the full article here, and the highlight to my mind is this visual timeline I put together.  I'm fairly pleased with how it came out.

A number of people asked how much of a difference martyrdom made in the frequency of papal saints in the early Church.

Of the 31 popes who died before Constantine's Edict of Milan in 313 legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, 27 were martyred and another 3 were once on the martyrology but were taken off in the 1960s because so little is known definitely about their lives that their martyrdoms were suspected of being legendary. Only one pre-edict pope, St. Zephyrinus whose pontificate stretched from 199 to 217, died of natural causes.

Of the 107 popes between 313 and the year 1000, 42 are saints, however only two have any claim to martyrdom. Pope St. John I died of starvation and mistreatment while imprisoned by the Ostrogoths in 526. Pope St. Martin I is also listed in the martyrology. He died in 655 while in forced exile by the Byzantine emperor over theological controversies.

However, only eight popes since 1000 have been canonized, and of those four were elected in the 20th Century: Pius X, John XXII, Paul VI, John Paul II

With John Paul I potentially joining that list, it's a fairly unusual string. 

It's probably reasonable to note that the the criteria for picking popes has changed since the papacy has become less focused on leading the papal states and wielding secular power, and more focused on the pastoral and spiritual leadership of the world's Catholics. Of the ten popes who have died since the end of the papal states in 1870, the only ones not declared at least "venerable" are Leo XIII and Pius XI.

However, as the papacy has become increasingly global in scope, there's also arguably a strong tendency to seek to have popes identified with particular factions within the Church canonized as a validation of that school of thought.