CNS STORY: Cardinal Saraiva Martins to beatify Mother Marianne Cope May 14

The whole CNS
public Web site
headlines, briefs
stories, etc,
represents less
than one percent
of the daily news
report.

Get all the news!

If you would like
more information
about the
Catholic News
Service daily
news report,
please contact
CNS at one of
the following:
cns@
catholicnews.com
or
(202) 541-3250

Copyright:

This material
may not
be published,
broadcast,
rewritten or
otherwise
distributed.

Copyright
(c) 2005
Catholic News
Service/U.S.
Conference of
Catholic Bishops.

CNS Story:

COPE-BEATIFY (UPDATED) May-4-2005 (950 words) xxxi

Cardinal Saraiva Martins to beatify Mother Marianne Cope May 14

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Mother Marianne Cope of Molokai will be beatified May 14 in St. Peter's Basilica, but Pope Benedict XVI will not celebrate the beatification Mass.

Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, prefect of the Congregation for Saints' Causes, told Vatican Radio May 4 that Pope Benedict had asked him to preside over the evening Mass.

The cardinal said the ceremony also would include the beatification of Spanish Sister Florentina Nicol Goni, also known as Mother Ascension del Corazon de Jesus, founder of the Dominican Missionaries of the Rosary.

The idea of a cardinal, rather than the pope, presiding over a beatification "is not something completely new, but a return to a centuries-long practice, which was in use until 1971," Cardinal Saraiva Martins told the radio.

For years, Vatican officials and theologians have been discussing the possibility of returning to the pre-1971 practice in order to clarify the fact that a beatification is different from the declaration of sainthood.

Mother Marianne was a member of the Sisters of St. Francis, who have their motherhouse in Syracuse, N.Y. Mother Marianne left the motherhouse 122 years ago to go to Hawaii to care for the victims of leprosy, which today is called Hansen's disease.

The Italian newspaper Il Giornale reported May 3 that Pope Benedict had decided that the prefect of the Congregation for Saints' Causes would preside over beatifications in the future, while the pope would preside at canonizations.

Before Pope John Paul II died, Mother Marianne's beatification was scheduled for May 15, but Pope Benedict is scheduled to ordain new priests that day for the Diocese of Rome.

Since at least 1989, Vatican officials have been discussing changes in the sainthood process, particularly the need to underline the difference between beatification and canonization.

Beatifications have become almost meaningless, several Vatican officials told CNS in 2003.

The church should return to the practice of having a cardinal, not the pope, preside over the ceremony, or eliminate that stage of the process altogether, several said.

Cardinal Saraiva Martins had said in 2003 that choosing who presides over the ceremony "is not a theological problem, but a pastoral one and must be considered in that light."

Archbishop Piero Marini, the papal master of liturgical ceremonies, told CNS he had been proposing a revision for years.

Pope Paul VI made the change when he decided to preside personally over the 1971 Mass for the beatification of Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan martyred in a concentration camp. Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul, concelebrated.

Since then, Archbishop Marini said, "we have been losing the sense of the distinction between beatification and canonization."

The most obvious differences between a beatification and canonization are the level of papal authority involved and the extent to which the person may be honored with public Masses and prayers.

The difference is seen, somewhat subtly, at the ceremonies: At a beatification, the bishop of the diocese where the person died asks the pope to declare the candidate blessed; at a canonization, the head of the congregation for saints asks in the name of the universal church that the pope proclaim the candidate a saint.

"I know 99 percent of Catholics would not notice that difference," Cardinal Saraiva Martins had said.

The difference was clear when the pope did only canonizations, Archbishop Marini said.

When someone is beatified, the pope allows members of the person's religious order and Catholics in the place the person lived to celebrate the newly beatified person's feast day Mass and hold other public acts of veneration.

Canonization, on the other hand, is an official papal declaration that the person -- now recognized as a saint -- is to be venerated throughout the Catholic Church.

Jesuit Father Paolo Molinari, a longtime postulator of saints' causes, told CNS May 3, "Pope Benedict has a pastoral understanding" that most Catholics do not realize the difference between beatification and canonization when the ceremonies are equally elaborate.

The new pope, he said, is prepared "to end the duplication which produced no good, but only created confusion."

Father Molinari said he hoped that a new emphasis on the distinction would calm the "mania on the part of organizations and religious orders to have their founders beatified and canonized."

The formal recognition that a person is a saint, he said, "is not the fruit of propaganda or good organization, but the result over time of many faithful looking to these individuals as friends in heaven, asking for their help and trying to imitate how they lived."

At a May 2 conference in Rome, Cardinal Saraiva Martins said, "Frequently I am asked about the supposedly 'excessive' number of saints and blesseds proclaimed (in the last 25 years), and Pope John Paul knew this.

"But it is not the pope who makes saints or, even less, the congregation -- which some refer to as a 'saint factory.' The church recognizes saints, the pope proclaims them, but God makes saints by spreading his grace and individuals become saints by welcoming his grace," the cardinal said.

Il Giornale said the distinction between an almost universal recognition of an individual's holiness and strong devotion by a small segment of the church was mentioned in a 1989 interview by the future Pope Benedict.

Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger told 30 Giorni, an Italian magazine, "The distinction between beatification and canonization is a completely reasonable instrument for differentiating between figures who can be examples in a specific environment and those who have a message to transmit to the entire church."

"However," he said, "I have the impression that today this distinction is not easily recognized from the outside."

END

Copyright (c) 2005 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
CNS · 3211 Fourth St NE · Washington DC 20017 · 202.541.3250