Papal control of the making of saints

By the twelfth century, a certain unease began to be felt among certain sectors of the clergy in the face of the proliferation of cults to servants of God about whom little was known, except that their remains produced miracles in a particular place. Around 1120, for example, the monk Guibert of Nogent, in his treatise De pigneribus sanctorum, vehemently denounced the abuses of certain ecclesiastics who were prepared to exploit popular credulity in order to increase the prestige and revenues of their sanctuary by exhibiting false relics; he expressed his amazement that three different churches in France should claim to have the head of St John Baptist.663 This sort of critical attitude was still rare, but it was taken up at the end of the century by the papacy, which, beginning with Alexander III, tried to exert a degree of control over the cult of saints from a perspective that was in the first place disciplinary: until then, by virtue of Carolingian legislation, the institution of the cult of a saint, old or new, had been within the remit of the bishops, but had to be approved by the provincial synod to which the diocese in question belonged. In practice, the bishops acted alone, as and when they thought fit, in performing elevations and translations of holy bodies, which amounted to the authorisation of a liturgical cult; similarly, the abbots of some monasteries, both large and small, did not hesitate to introduce on their own initiative the cult oftheir founder or of a particular monk who had died in an odour of sanctity, even in the absence of the local bishop and without his agreement. In the wake of the Gregorian Reform and the centralisation round the Roman Church that accompanied it, the papacy intervened to impose some order on this anarchic situation. Its intervention was in general readily accepted because it gave the cults it officially recognised the sanction of its authority, guaranteeing them renown throughout western Christendom, even though the introduction of feasts of newly canonised saints into the local liturgical calendars was not obligatory and remained within the competence of each religious community. The situation was made quite clear at the juridical level with the insertion into the Decretals of Gregory IX, in 1234, of a letter of Alexander III, of 1172, in which the pope prohibited the celebration of the cult of a new saint without the authorisation of the Holy See.664 In practice, however, the bishops retained up until the sixteenth century the right to institute new feasts within their dioceses.

Increased control over the cult of saints by the hierarchy was accompanied by a process of verification - and hence definition - by the papacy on behalf of the Roman Church. Here, Innocent III (1198-1216) played a decisive role by affirming, notably in the bull of canonisation of St Homobonus of Cremona (d. 1197), his desire to subject sainthood itself to detailed scrutiny:

Although, according to the testimony of Truth, only final perseverance is required for a soul to attain to sainthood in the Church Triumphant, since 'he who stands firm to the end will be saved’, nevertheless, in the Church Militant, two things are required for someone to be deemed a saint: virtue of morals and truth of signs, that is, pious works in life and miracles after death.665

The pope also emphasised in this text that miracles were often ambiguous because 'Pharaoh’s magicians performed them long ago and the Antichrist will perform prodigies so as to seduce into error even the elect’; it was only in cases where real and proven merits were followed by self-evident miracles that the latter constituted a sufficiently sure sign of sainthood for the church to proceed to venerate those whom God had designated in this way. These new requirements, which meant that the Holy See had to exercise a choice from among the supernatural phenomena that surrounded the servants of God and their relics, gave rise to the canonisation process. The oldest such process known - that of the hermit Galgano in Tuscany (d. ii8i) - dates from 1185, but the complete juridical form was reached only after 1230. From then until the sixteenth century the procedure began with a local enquiry conducted by a bishop intended to draw the attention of the Holy See to a saint he believed deserved to be canonised, which produced a preliminary file, with the emphasis on the miracles, which was sent to the Curia. Then, if he thought fit, the pope opened an enquiry called an inquisitio in partibus; this was entrusted to three commissioners, usually bishops or abbots of the region concerned, who went to the places where the servants of God had lived to interrogate witnesses who had known them in life or who had benefited from their intercession. In the final - and most unpredictable - phase of the process, the complete file was scrutinised by a commission of cardinals charged with the preparation of a report which was presented to the pope and discussed in consistory. After taking advice from his cardinals, the pope gave his decision, and proceeded (or not) to the canonisation of the new saint - that is, his or her inscription into the 'catalogue of saints’ of the Catholic Church - during a liturgical ceremony that was accompanied by sermons eulogising this 'friend of God’; the decision was then notified to Christendom by a solemn bull which authorised the saint’s liturgical cult. The canonisation process was feared by the postulants and did, indeed, constitute a fairly effective barrier in the face of the many requests which arrived in the Holy See: out of the forty-eight enquiries in partibus ordered by the papacy between 1198 and 1276 with a view to the canonisation of a saint, twenty-five - over half - came to nothing; and it was necessary for many of them to be repeated or completed because the acts in the form in which they had been transmitted to Rome by the investigators failed to satisfy the requirements now made by the papacy.

But the introduction of papal canonisation was not only or even primarily a way of stemming the flow of popular sanctity. Most of all, it was a response to the desire of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to propose to the clergy and to the faithful figures of totally virtuous and orthodox recent saints whom they might try to imitate, instead of venerating relics of doubtful authenticity or succumbing to the appeal ofthe ascetic behaviour and irreproachable morality of the Perfect Cathars or the itinerant Waldensian preachers. The most lucid among the clergy realised, at the end of the twelfth century and even more in the thirteenth, with the rise of the mendicant orders, that if the church wanted to Christianise in depth a population that was in part - mainly in urban areas - tending to escape its influence, it had to offer models of religious behaviour likely to win their support. So they introduced a pastoral use of sanctity, in the form of hagiographical texts devoted to persons who had often lived recently and led active lives: alongside the military saints, real or mythical, often represented on the doorways of Gothic cathedrals (Roland, let us not forget, was venerated as a martyr, as was Guillaume d'Orange, who had distinguished himself in the battle against the Saracens before becoming a monk at Gellone), there appeared artisan saints and merchant saints, especially in Italy and Flanders, where these socio-professional groups were particularly numerous and influential. Innocent III ratified this trend in 1199 by canonising St Homobonus, a former draper of Cremona who had died two years earlier and who was distinguished by his zeal in the practice of penitence and charity. It was with a similar aim that, in 1215, a French cleric, James of Vitry (d. 1240), later bishop of St John of Acre and cardinal, wrote the Life of a mystical beguine, Marie d'Oignies (d. 1213), whose spiritual director and confidant he had been, for the benefit of the female laity in the south of France who might be tempted to join the Cathars.