On the Canonisation Of Non-Catholics

Awfully sorry, old boy.....

Mark O’Shea has an article about the canonisation of Non-Catholics, whereby a reader asks him whether the Church should not canonise C.S. Lewis (not a Catholic but a valiant fighter for Christianity throughout).

O’Shea’s answer is basically that the Church should not canonise non-Catholics because this would – irrespectively of the good life and intention of the person in question – downplay the very important difference between those who have the Truth and those who haven’t.

In my eyes, there is another important observation which should be made: in order to canonise someone, the Church needs miracles. Unless I am mistaken, She needs two of them for a non martyr and one for a martyr. Miracles show the will of God in the matter. No miracles, no will of God, no canonisation even if one went to Paradise with the limo.

Now this should introduce an important consideration: how is it that there are no miracles attributed to obviously saintly Protestants? Please let us again remember what the Church says about miracles, that they occur so that God may give us certainty that the person in question is in Heaven. Now, it would appear that God wants to give us proof that a lot of Catholics went to Heaven, but doesn’t want to give us the same guarantee about Protestants.

If he wanted, he would inspire Christians (not necessarily Catholics) to pray for a saintly person’s intercession (some Anglicans do it; Episcopalians might do it) and then He would allow miracles linked with this person to happen. And then the Episcopalians or Anglicans would be able to boast of their own great saints, of the Anglican Padre Pios so to speak and claim that evidently one way is as good to arrive at destination as the other. This just doesn’t happen and whilst I do not doubt that the Anglicans have their own catalogue of “saints”, I doubt that anyone of them would pass the standard demanded of the Catholic ones.

This doesn’t mean that many Protestant are not in Heaven of course; but it certainly means that entrance into Paradise through the window (or the back door) is something God doesn’t want to put a great stress on.

There is only one Church. It is the one of St. Francis, of St. Dominic, of St. Teresa of Avila, of St. Catherine of Sienna, of Padre Pio, of all Her great heroes.
God has shown to us that those great man to whom inexplicable events are linked are invariably Catholic. This happens for a reason and if you ask me it is nothing to do with what the Church should or should not do, because the Church doesn’t create the process.

It has to do with what God wants.

God wants you to be a Catholic.

Mundabor.