c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Several theologians have objected to the fast track to sanctity on which Pope Benedict XVI has placed his illustrious predecessor, John Paul II. These scholars argue that, great and good as the late pope was, his suppression of theological dialogue retarded the reforms of Vatican Council II.

If he is a saint in eternity, there is no hurry to canonize him in time. A little delay cannot harm him or the millions of Catholics who are still trying to absorb or at least get used to the record number of saints that he made while in office.

While theologians exchange views on this, most Catholics go about their daily lives feeling remote at best from the ranks of these new saints, so many of whom lived out of plain sight and as far from ordinary life as they could get, in remote convents and monasteries.

Do we really need another clergyman, famished monk, cloistered visionary or the dour founder of some pious group holding up a rule book on how you become a saint by fleeing the world? The best argument against speeding up what is called “the process” of making John Paul II a saint arises from his judgment in choosing a married couple to be designated as saints. They had given up sexual relations while still in their vigorous years. This may not have appalled, but it certainly gave pause to average couples just struggling to share their life and love under the burdens, distractions and fatigue of everyday existence.

And if a pope can be that astigmatic in his vision of married life, how can we ever expect bureaucrats, especially those serving on a Vatican congregation, to have a better view of the lives of ordinary men and women and of the varied trials and triumphs that even the most loving of them experience?

There was a time when the judgment of ordinary good people was accepted as the ultimate validation of a person’s sanctity. If the process and speed of identifying saints were handed over to lay Catholics, they would only be taking back a responsibility that was theirs in the early centuries of the church.

And, allowing all due respect for John Paul II, they would fast-track Patty Crowley, a great and holy woman who died a few weeks ago in Chicago. She spent every minute of her 92 years making a lot out of other people while making little of herself.

On the snowy day of her funeral at Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral, thousands of people gathered not to mourn the loss of this remarkable woman but to affirm the open secret of her sanctity.

Like her remarkable extended family, those in the church symbolized the true diversity of gender and race that she brought together as naturally as she breathed. This truly Catholic spirit put a blessing on the cathedral.

One could hear it in the Caribbean rhythms of the music and in the deep but not restless silence of the interludes. Nobody fidgeted or glanced at watches. Time yielded to the aura of the eternal spreading out from Patty’s life. Everybody knew she was a saint in that peaceful, quiet way in which we wordlessly possess great truths, as when we know that we are loved or that we have done the right thing.

The pews were filled with people who knew Patty’s story, and most had been personally touched by her goodness. She and her late husband, Pat, founded the Christian Family Movement. They were members of the lay group that went to bear witness to the healthiness of human sexuality and the goodness of married love during the discussions of Vatican II.

Patty was the kind of person who could see past the bureaucratic blunders of the visit of these Catholic couples to the Vatican where they were forced to separate and sleep in different locations during their stay there. Patty could see through the corrupted shallowness of this frightened approach to human beings and into the great mystery of the church that needed to be freed to deal with men and women more gently and with more understanding.

Patty raised her own children and other children, visited the sick and those in prison, supported the church and its good works even when, as in its pathetic segregation of married couples during their visit to the Vatican, it manifested its need to control rather than affirm good people.

John Paul II would willingly step aside to allow Patty’s canonization to precede his own. There is, however, no need for that because the people who are the church are way ahead of the bureaucrats who think they are the church.

MO/PH END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

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