Donald Prudlo, Thank Goodness Fulton Sheen’s Cause Has Been Suspended
Some responses to Prudlo in the combox at NLM: “Thank Goodness Fulton Sheen’s Cause Has Been Suspended” - An Excellent Article on Canonizations
I agree with much of Professor Prudlo's post, though I would probably dispute the link between canonization and papal infallibility:
This is encouraging in the age of fast-tracked canonizations which tend to minimize the gravity of such elevations, bound up as they are with historical affirmations of papal infallibility. It is good to slow processes, indeed sometimes stop them altogether. Cults should arise out of spontaneous devotion and proper ecclesial supervision and care. Saints should be “from the ground up” as it were. Saints were never intended to be top-down impositions of models of life or patterns of holiness dictated by mere authority. Cults should be allowed to spread organically, and sometimes be permitted to die out of their own accord, with careful shepherding by Church authorities. This is why the old fifty-year rule was in place. This should permit enough time to make sure that a cult was genuine, that it was a result of the unfolding of an authentic discernment of holiness in the life of the Church, and provides the needed leisure for the operations of the various complex tasks associated with presenting a cause. The Church should not conform itself to this age of instant gratification, with its attendant shallowness. The old rule also provided a cooling-off period so that people too intimately involved in the life and career of the potential saint had been mostly laid in their graves. Unfortunately a kind of historical chauvinism afflicts many today, thinking that they either live in the darkest times in Church history or in the “broad, sunlit uplands” of Pollyanna-ish progressivism. The endurance of a cult long after the principals are dead is a telling mark of its validity.
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