An Essay on Beatification, Canonization, and the Processes of the Congregation of Rites

Anyone who reads the lives of the saints comes to the parts that are hard to take. St. Raymond sails from Majorca to Barcelona on his cloak. St. Francis curses a disobedient provincial, and a bolt from heaven kills the man in his bed. A Catholic who loves the saints wants to know how much of this he is bound to believe, and the lives themselves do not say.

Fr. Faber wrote this essay in 1847 to answer that question for readers of a series of saints’ lives he was editing. He explains what the Church has vouched for when she names a servant of God Venerable, beatifies him, or canonizes him, and how far her guarantee reaches into the stories told about him. She cannot err in a canonization, he concludes, though whether that is itself an article of faith is still open, and each marvel must stand on its own evidence.

Then comes the trial a cause undergoes in Rome, told after Benedict XIV, for years the Promoter of the Faith, the officer whose duty is to object. The Congregation weighed Cardinal Ximenes’s remark, perhaps a joke, that the pope could use a fright. A nun’s cure from epilepsy, examined eighteen months after her last seizure, waited thirteen years in case she relapsed. In an ordinary court doubt favors the accused; here it goes against the servant of God.

The last part belongs to the reader. Faber gives seven tests for any marvel, then closes with what he had seen the stories do for crowds of plain people and the rule every spiritual master gives: read the saints slowly, a little at a time, wanting to be made better more than to be surprised.