saints

saints, in the Christian tradition, are deceased members of the faithful believed to have already entered into heavenly glory. In the early church, saints were created by popular acclamation in response to their holiness of life, testified by martyrdom, miracles, and other forms of heroic witness to the faith. Canonization permitted the organization of a cult and the saint's inclusion in the local church's liturgical calendar. For the local Christian communities who proclaimed them, saints were both a practical moral example to follow and a bridge between themselves and the divine, available to intercede before a God who, despite the assurance of the dogma of the incarnation, could appear distant. In this sense, the saints personalized and localized the dogmas of the faith. The cults of the Virgin Mary and of such early Irish saints as Brigid and Finian are good examples of this. Later, local bishops took control of the canonization process and it was finally reserved to the Holy See in the 12th century. Rome formalized it in the 13th century and updated it in the 1740s. In 1983 a major revision was carried out by John Paul II.

Although Irish saints crowd the local liturgical calendar, only a small number, including St Malachy, Laurence O'Toole, and Oliver Plunkett, have been officially canonized by the church. The public veneration of a greater number has been papally sanctioned by the canonical process of beatification: these have included Thaddeus McCarthy (d. 1497), bishop of Ross and later Cloyne, several Reformation martyrs, and Edmund Rice (see christian brothers). Despite the paucity of officially canonized native saints, Irish devotional practice has been marked by veneration of holy places, wells, and relics associated with both officially canonized and popularly proclaimed saints, at home and abroad. This was traditionally expressed in pilgrimages and patterns. The neo‐Tridentine church disapproved of many of these due to their semi‐pagan origins and the moral licence which often accompanied them. Alternative, sanitized cults were imported, St Thérèse of Lisieux and St Maria Goretti joining a large number of earlier continental imports such as St Nicholas, St John the Baptist, and St Anne. The cult of the saints lost some of its importance with the liturgical reforms of the second Vatican Council (1962–5), especially the renewed emphasis on the centrality of Christ and the eucharist. However, ease of travel has led to an increase in religious pilgrimages abroad, especially to Marian shrines in Europe.

Bibliography

Martimort, A. J. , Liturgy and Time(1986)

Thomas O'Connor