Celebrating New Saints in Rome and Across the Globe

chapter 8 Celebrating New Saints in Rome and across the Globe

Pamela M. Jones

Men and women recognized for exemplary holiness had been revered as saints since the early Christian era, but in the late 16th and 17th centuries the papacy took definitive control and made Rome the center of official sanctity. Between 1492, the opening year of this volume, and 1587, only three persons were subject to papal canonization (the creation of “saints”). They were Francis of Paola (1416–1507), founder of the Order of the Minims, canonized by Pope Leo X (r.1513–21), and two men canonized on the same day by Pope Adrian VI (r.1522– 23), Antoninus, a Dominican friar and archbishop of Florence (1389–1459), and Benno, bishop of Meissen (c.1040–1106).1 Papal canonization, therefore, had long been in virtual disuse prior to the decades of confessional turbulence from 1523 through 1587 when it continued to languish. Furthermore, although in 1563 the Council of Trent decreed saints to be greatly beneficial to the faithful, the next canonization occurred only in 1588.2 This essay focuses on the watershed era beginning in 1588 and continuing through the 17th century, during which canonization procedure was standardized and many new saints were created. The return of saint-making was intimately connected to the new religious Orders, which could not flourish without saints of their own, as well as to the papacy’s goal of spreading and deepening the Catholic faith throughout the world, partly through the minis- try of religious Orders, both old and new. Sainthood became standardized in

1 See Finucane 2011, 117–66, on Francis of Paola; 167–206, on Antoninus; and 207–40, on Benno. See also S.J. Cornelison, Art and the Relic Cult of St. Antoninus in Renaissance Florence (Burlington, VT, 2012). For an overview, see T. Herzig, “Saints and Mystics: Before Trent,” in Oxford Bibliographies, last modified: 11 January 2018, http://www.oxfordbibliographies. com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/obo-9780195399301-0377.xml (accessed 7 January 2018). 2 From 1523–87 popes continued to confirm non-universal cults. See the text below. For an overview, see E.K. Rowe, “Saints and Mystics: After Trent,” in Oxford Bibliographies, last modified: 30 September 2013, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo- 9780195399301/obo-9780195399301-0100.xml (accessed 7 January 2018).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004391963_010 Celebrating New Saints in Rome and across the Globe 149 this period because it was part of the Church’s language of legitimation and was one of its means of oversight of worldwide devotion. Canonization bulls of this period make these points utterly clear, as attested by a passage from Ignatius Loyola’s bull of 1622:

[Luther] awoke the spirit of Ignatius Loyola, who … then committed himself … to governing and forming [a religious Order], so that at last his new Society of Jesus, which among other works of piety and charity, converted heathens and recalled heretics to belief in the truth. Upon the institution of the Order, he devoted himself to the defense of the Roman Pontiff’s power and to leading a life of admirable holiness.3

Furthermore, it is declared in the 1622 canonization bull of Teresa of Avila, founder of the Discalced Carmelite Order:

And we [Pope Gregory XV] preside by means of our pastoral solicitude over the universal Church … [Therefore], by Apostolic authority, we have decreed that [Teresa], as holy and elected by God, is to be worshipped and venerated …. In our new afflictions God defends us with his protec- tions and multiplies his friends [that is, new saints], who shall protect and defend his Church by their merits and intercession on behalf of the faithful.4

To return to the year 1588, that is when the Franciscan Pope Sixtus V (r.1585– 90) elevated to sainthood Diego de Alcalá (c.1400–63), a Franciscan lay brother who had helped to Christianize the Canary Islands, under Castilian rule since the early 15th century.5 Moreover, Sixtus established a curial committee—the Congregazione dei Riti (Congregation of Rites)—to oversee saints’ causes.6 During the next half-century the legal process of papal canonization, which had been set out in the 12th century, was clarified: Saints were deemed worthy of universal cults (i.e. public veneration around the world). Meanwhile, be- atification, the creation of lesser-ranking “blesseds” who were deemed worthy only of non-universal cults, became subject to the same judicial procedure for the first time, making it an official step toward sainthood. A long-held ruling of

3 Codex Constitutionum Quas Summi Pontifices Ediderunt In Solemni Canonizatione Sanctorum, ed. J. Fontanino (Rome, 1728), 329. 4 Ibid., 305. 5 For the long process and realpolitik of Diego’s canonization, see Dandelet 2001, 170–78. 6 Ditchfield 2010, 29–47; Jones forthcoming.