medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Although your query was addressed to Dr. Jestice, perhaps I might be permitted to interject:
in the case of the English martyrs, there was a very simple reason: the persecution of the Catholic Church in England from Elizabethan times onward meant that there was not English Catholic hierarchy to petition for introduction of a cause of canonization. An effort was indeed made by the Catholics in exile at Douai, I believe, in the 17thc perhaps, but went nowhere. Immediately upon the restoration of the English Catholic hierarchy in the mid-19thc, one of the first things the bishops did was to ask that causes be introduced. The authorities in Rome hesitated because the Kulturkampf was just heating up in Germany and they feared further inflaming anti-Catholic sentiment. We forget that Cathlics were imprisoned in Germany during the Bismarck era.
Finally, a compromise was reached: Beatification by confirmation of existing cultus in the 1880s. This bypassed the need to declare the English martyrs to have been martyrs and thereby offend against the official English line--that they had been political offenders. Only in 1970,after research to establish that they truly died for their religious beliefs was done by the Historical Section of the Congregation for the Rites (now Congregation for the Causes of Saints) were they canonized.
More often, the reason for the long delay has other reasons. I just finished a study of the Carthusian beati and sancti. In about a dozen cases, a limited local cult emerged around a Carthusian nun or monk, but the order had a policy of never encouraging canonization causes. In several cases, the local cult eventually was taken up by a sympathetic bishop (e.g., the bishop of Belley in the 17thc, regarding Carthusianswho died in the 12thc). But he did this about the time that Urban VIII put in place the very strict Roman process for investigating causes. Relatively few saints were canonized during the entire 17th and 18thc. For French Carthusians, then came the Revolution and the religious orders were simply trying to avoid the guillotine. Only in the mid-19thc were these dozen or so Carthusians finally beatified on the basis of existing cult. Saint Roseline of Villeneuve (des Arcs) in Provence would be another example.
I think it fair to generalize that there are the "big names" (Saint Francis, St. Elizabeth etc.)who received fairly expeditous investigations and canonizations, the "middle level" whose causes may have taken longer but still were relatively rapid (a few decades). Then there are the "little" cults, often local, that keep alive at a relatively low level for centuries. The 19thc was the great era where these local cults, perhaps out of the general 19thc rediscovery of medieval heritage that is manifested in so many different ways, were brought to the attention of Rome by bishops. If you look at the article on "Saints" in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualite, you see that recogition of existing cult was far and way the most common pattern for beatifications during the 19thc. Many of these beati had died centuries earlier.
Another way of looking at it is that the whole question of what constitutes an adequate process for investigating sancity was up for grabs in the later Middle Ages and early modern period; Urban VIII and Benedict XIV laid out the very exhaustive processs in the 17th and 18thc, which very much slowed down the whole process compared to the pre-Roman popular and local process of the early Middle Ages and the mixture of Roman and local-popular that characterized the high Middle Ages. After the slow-down of several centuries, the large number of beatifications by confirmation of local cults hit in the 19thc.
At least that's a partial explanation.
Dennis Martin
>>> [log in to unmask] 11/03/01 10:05 AM >>>
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dear Phyllis Jestice: Why are so many saints recognized like Simon
Ballachi long after their deaths? He was four hundred years afte his
death and I notgice that not a few are so designated, as, for
example, a group of English martyrs. Yours, John Mundy
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