Another edition of “Headline News”

Such a headline:

“Pope imposes financial oversight for saints after abuses”

You would think those saints in Heaven wouldn’t be such spendthrifts. I guess they get giddy with their mansions in our Father’s house.

Still I got to love phrases like:

Vatican’s multimillion-dollar saint-making machine

Although there was very good reason for reform as bureaucracies tend towards corruption. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints is not necessarily staffed by saints to say the least.

The books estimated the average cost for each beatification at around 500,000 euros ($550,000), with much of the proceeds going to a few lucky people with contracts to do the often time-consuming investigations into the candidates’ lives. The family of one well-known investigator, for example, also had the Vatican monopoly on printing the documentation for each saintly cause, studies that often amount to dozens of volumes.

While candidates who inspire wealthy donors would sprint ahead, those with less wealthy fans would languish. American saints often cost the most precisely because the most money was donated, and the postulator could spend it on the best researchers to get the cause through, according to the book “Avarice” by journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi.

This shows one reason why I am thinking ahead for my own canonization. I was thinking about running a GoFundMe campaign to make sure I have the necessary bucks to sustain the costs involved. Plus I just can’t rely on large crowds of people chanting “Santo Subito” after I die, especially the people that knew me.

Another phrase I liked in the article was “science-defying miracles” – take that science. That might be a common view of miracles, but an incorrect one. I like this explanation from Catholic Answers

A miracle may be defined as an event that occurs in nature but that has a cause lying outside nature, that is, a supernatural cause. Miracles are not violations of the laws of nature. The way we know if an event is a miracle is by seeing if it could have been caused by natural forces.

The language in this article cracks me up.

Martyrs, or people who were killed for their faith, get a free pass and can be beatified without a miracle.

Martyrs are encourage by that “free pass”, dying for their faith is such a shortcut.

Still it does remind me of that wonderful line in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”:

“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”

Still as awkward as this article was at times in how it was worded, it is at least one that tried to do the subject some justice. However clumsily that was.