Everything is Easier Today....Unless You Want to be a Saint

Baltimore Archbishop Lewandowski with pictures
of Black candidates for sainthood. (WSJ photo)

There has never been a Black Catholic saint from the United States: [bold added]

[In November] at a church in Baltimore, a group of Catholics launched a campaign calling on Pope Francis to name six men and women the first Black Catholic saints from the U.S...The Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, responded that investigations are under way of all six proposed saints and in some cases their “heroic virtues” have been officially acknowledged. But the Vatican’s rules for canonization—the formal declaration by the pope that someone is a saint—ordinarily require at least one verified miracle attributed to the proposed saint’s intercession, something that has not yet occurred for any of the six Black Americans.

The intercession occurs after the candidate's death, i.e., supplicants pray to the proposed candidate for a miraculous healing:

theologians must decide whether the healing was due to the intercession of the candidate for canonization, which means that those who prayed for his or her help did so at the time of the healing and that they prayed only to the proposed saint and no one else. Additional prayers to the Virgin Mary, whom Catholics consider the pre-eminent intercessor, or Jesus himself aren’t considered disqualifying.

Comments:
1) Racism is not the reason that there are no Black Catholic American saints:

There are a number of canonized Black saints, most of them from Africa, but including the Peruvian St. Martin de Porres (1579-1639), who cared for orphans, the poor and the sick.

2) It will become tougher to qualify for sainthood as advancing technology will be identified as the cause of what used to be called medical miracles.

3) Technology will also produce much more documentation--text, video, audio, data from instruments--that will scrutinize "miracles" more closely and likely raise the bar higher.

4) Worshippers have to pray to the candidate after he or she dies, whereupon a subsequent miracle occurs that proves that the candidate, now in heaven, interceded with God. That's a tall order--it took Mother Teresa 19 years after death to be canonised in 2016.

5) This non-Catholic hopes that at least one American Black Catholic saint will be canonized. What counts for this humble blogger is not that miracles be documented but that he, she, or they help to model selflessness, faith, and service for Black Catholics--or all Christians for that matter.