GETTING PAST THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE

Dominic Crossley-Holland meets

the men who want to make saints of Newman and others

'WE'RE waiting for a sign from heaven,' Father Gregory Winterton said, 'and I've every confidence the Lord will do the necessary.' The tireless promoters of Car- dinal Newman's cause at Birmingham Ora- tory say news of a miracle could come any day now.

Last week the Pope declared the great Victorian churchman 'Venerable' and of `heroic virtue', the first official clearance on the way to sainthood, and that, says Father Gregory Winterton, will do his cause no end of good. The publicity might just bring to light the two miracles needed for beatification and canonisation.

On a recent trip to Rome I met the subject of another miracle, Gleida Danese. Signing autographs for adoring nuns, blinking through thick spectacles, and chewing gum she was clearly relishing her fame. I had caught up with her at a papal audience preceding the beatification of the Italian missionary, Annibale di Francia. Gleida, a teenage Brazilian orphan, had been dying of a ruptured aorta. Her sudden recovery, she said, was due to the intercession of Annibale, the founder of her orphanage, to whom she prayed.

She was in Rome at the invitation of the Vatican department responsible for mak- ing saints, the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Its medical committee, drawn from nearly 100 specialists, had been baffled by her cure. That Sunday Annibale was to be beatified.

The Congregation is housed on the second floor of a faceless modern building at the top of the Via della Conciliazione overlooking St Peter's Square. I pressed the button in the lift marked 'Pro Causis Sanctorum' and ascended heavenwards.

The Congregation's box-like rooms and long corridors were those of an ascetic bureaucracy. All was eerily quiet, odour- 'Let me through — I'm a necrophiliac.' less and full of reflected light. The waiting- room was empty; the queue invisible. Only the office of the Devil's Advocate's was a reassuring mess of higgledy-piggledy piles of documents and quarto volumes.

Understandably Monsignor Antoni Pet- ti, the Promotor Justitiae, does not like to be called the Devil's Advocate, but the nickname describes his function as pro- secuting counsel when it comes to vetting saintly CVs. Most helpful to inquirers, but passionately defensive about his work, he meticulously sifts through the material collected by causes and casts out the unsuitable.

In Newman's case, 120,000 documents were amassed by the Jesuit Father Vincent Blehl, the postulator, who acts as both researcher and presenter of the case to the Congregation. Once the Devil's Advocate approves a cause, as he has done with Newman, it goes to the Congregation's historical and theological committees for detailed examination, before finally going before the Pope.

Recently this process has been well used. `JP wants to canonise so many we can hardly keep up,' one Jesuit saint-maker confided. 'Some say he's relaxing the standards of sanctity, and politicising them.'

In the 12 years since he became Pope, John Paul H is believed to have made almost more saints and blesseds than all his predecessors put together since papal canonisations became the exclusive proce- dure in the 13th century. On its frequent trundles in all parts of the world, the

popemobile leaves in its wake new local saints for an evangelising Church. The new churches of Asia and Africa in particular are thought to benefit from exemplars of their own. Sometimes there are multiple promotions. 117 Vietnamese martyrs in one go in 1988, 85 English martyrs in 1987 . .

But it is not all down to a prolific pope: the rules have been changed. Only one miracle is needed for beatification, another for canonisation, not the two previously needed for each stage. In the case of martyrs miracles are not required.

Gone, it seems, are the ponderous proce- dures that kept Joan of Arc waiting nearly 500 years. But a man's chances of becom- ing a saint remain far better than a woman's. Women only account for one in five of all beatifications and canonisations. It helps to be in holy orders, or to live in a Latin country, or to die young. And it can be a great mistake to write too much. Every line has to be ploughed through by cause and the Congregation. That is said to have slowed the prolific Newman's prog- ress, however beautiful his prose.

Ideas of what makes a saint change: once inquisitors were canonised. For many today Mother Teresa is a living saint. Her selfless life spent in the service of the destitute and the sick conforms to their notion of what a saint should be. In private, officials intimate that it is likely she will progress quickly towards sainthood. But they point out that under current rules a cause cannot be started until five years after the death of a candidate. Members of the Curia say current front- runners include the murdered Solidarity priest Father Jerzy Popieluszko; they see his case as a clear martyrdom. And the Pope, who inevitably exerts considerable influence over these things, is said to be very keen. And of course there's a Euro saint-in-waiting too. Robert Schuman, who helped lay the foundations of the Euro- pean Community in 1950, has a sizeable lobby in France.

The Pope said he wanted 'modern saints for modern times' and he's beginning to get them. Last year he beatified Pier Giorgio Frassati, the bon-vivant son of the founder of La Stampa, who died of polio aged 24. Pier's niece said of him, 'He loved women, sport, drink and, above all, freedom . . . but he never forgot life was a gift from God.' Pier spent much of his short life among down-and-outs, and it was to the astonishment of his family that hundreds of beggars and orphans turned up at his funeral, alongside the cream of Turin society, to pay homage to the man who they knew simply as `Girolamo', the name he used when about his good works.

It is difficult to see Cardinal Newman in this light. He seems an unlikely sort of hero in comparison. An intellectual who agon- ised his way from Evangelical Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, a controversialist, and yet a precursor of the ecumenical movement. John Henry Newman's heroship lies elsewhere, in a freedom of mind and an integrity worthy of any age. His recognition confirms the catholicity of the company of saints.