Few people have had the time to sort through even these several centuries of saints and come up with a tally of officially canonized saints. In general the range of answers to this question is between 1, and 8, saints. However, this may not include the vast number of saints that have been canonized in the past few decades. For example, St. Some people claim there have been at least billion births since the beginning of human existence.
How many of those people are in Heaven is a matter of speculation, and none of us will definitively know that until the end of our own lives on earth. What does matter is that everyone is called to holiness and should strive to become a saint. Holiness is attainable to anyone who desires a close relationship with Jesus and can be achieved in any profession or vocation on earth.
Anthony Messenger. More recently, the Oxford Dictionary of Saints currently has 1, entries, but this is not necessarily limited to saints proper or to saints recognized in the Catholic Church, as opposed to saints in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Furthermore, none of these is an authoritative Church document, so take them with a grain of salt. And we immediately run into a big problem. In the first eight or nine centuries, there was no centralized process for canonization of a saint. In , the Congregation published the Index ac status Causarum , an authoritative listing of all saints recognized as such in its years of operation. The total: Good luck finding this document online and if you do, you need to know Latin.
According to this Catholic reference site. The ones this month were announced on October Some may wish to add the number canonized by popes since the first papal canonization in That would bring the total to: Source here. C oming up next: What is the process for canonization? Ulrich of Augsburg was the first to be canonized by a pope, in , and the Vatican eventually took over and formalized the process. The Vatican's Roman Martyrology says some 7, people have been canonized or beatified an earlier step , but some scholars believe the total number of saints is more like 10, Pope Francis, who has been pontiff for just over a year, has already canonized men and women, but of them were martyrs from a single group of Italians who were beheaded by Ottoman Turks in the 15th Century.
John Paul II canonized during the quarter-century he presided over the church, but more than of those were from groups of martyrs, according to the Catholic World Report. With so many halos being handed out, you might think so. Yet only about a third of all popes are saints, and it's getting harder to make the leap the from St.
Peter's throne to sainthood, according to the Pew Research Center. Fifty-two of the first 55 popes got the nod but that pace has slowed dramatically.
Only five popes have become saints in the last 1, years, although that will now shoot up to seven. Canonization is permanent but some saints have been, for lack of a better term, demoted — by being dropped from the Vatican's list of official feast days, sometimes because of questions about whether they actually existed. One notable example is Saint Philomena, who was recognized in after a tomb with a remains of a teenage girl was found in the Roman catacombs with the inscription "Filumena" and a symbol of martydom, according to the Times of London.
0コメント