Alan: I have lonstanding interest in hagiography and have self-published two books on the Catholic Calendar of Saints. The following article is the most informative article on the subject I have come across.
Excerpt: "Most ot the earliest saints were martyrs like Polycarp (burned "at the stake" c. 150 A.D.), for their witness to Christ by the shedding of their blood made them powerful intercessors on behalf of weaker or more timid Christians. Those who had succumbed during persecution and offered sacrifice to the pagan gods flocked to the prisons to seek absolution and intercession from martyrs awaiting execution. The martyrs' prayers were considered even more powerful after their death. With the easing of persecution, and the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire (4th century A.D.), churches were built over the graves of the martyrs, and became magnets for pilgrims. These shrine churches outside the city walls posed a problem for bishops seeking to unite the local churches around their own authority. The burial sites where the martyr-saints were sought out as heav enly patrons or physicians threatened to become rival cneters of religious power and influence... As Peter Brown has argued, the problem was defused by "translating" the relics of the saints into the city, and enshrining htme under or near the bishop's own altar, where they would underpin rather than threaten hierarchical authority. The "translation" of a saint's bones from grave to altar would remain the act constituting canonization for almost a thousand years. And this public veneration of the saint's dead body marks a momoentous divergence from Roman paganism and from Christianity's parent faith, Judaism, for both shunned the bodies of the dead as sources of pollution."
The Intense Afterlife of the Saints
Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation
by Robert Bartlett
Princeton University Press, 787 pp., $39.95
In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Voragine and the Golden Legend
by Jacques Le Goff, translated from the French by Lydia G. Cochrane
Princeton University Press, 214 pp., $29.95
Even during her affectionate marriage her piety had been characterized by midnight prayer vigils, lavish works of charity, and acts of penance, of a scale and intensity unheard of in a high-status, sexually active wife and mother. She now took a vow of celibacy, adopted the coarse gray habit of the newly formed Franciscan Third Order, and placed herself under the spiritual direction of Conrad of Marburg, a sadistic former inquisitor, who separated her from her children, replaced her personal maids with brutal warders, and subjected her to a penitential regime that included severe beatings and public humiliations.
Elizabeth survived Conrad’s abuse for only four years. But the humility and charity of the smiling princess, who dressed like a pauper and personally ministered to the destitute and diseased in a hospital built with her own money, spectacularly embodied the ideals of her admirer Francis of Assisi. Her contemporaries took note. Within hours of her death her coffin was besieged by crowds of eager suppliants in search of healing or blessing. Pilgrims tore strips from her clothes, or cut the hair, nails, and even the nipples from her body as relics, and miracles began. A papal commission, ironically headed by her guide and tormentor Conrad, investigated Elizabeth’s miracles and virtues in 1232. Pope Gregory IX formally canonized her three years later.
Elizabeth’s radiant personality and the pathos of her short life make her one of the most endearing saints of the Middle Ages, while the course of her canonization highlights major shifts within the medieval cult of the saints. Her fame signaled the emergence of a new kind of female sanctity, active in the world rather than shut away in a cloister.
Hercanonization by the pope was equally novel, because for almost a millennium any bishop might proclaim someone a saint, and this right had been claimed as an exclusive papal prerogative only since the early 1200s: there were no known papal canonizations at all before 993 AD. Once established, it was a monopoly that the medieval popes exercised very sparingly. The years between 1200 and 1250 witnessed an unprecedented blossoming of religious energy in Europe and the emergence of hugely successful new revival movements like the friars. Francis, the Poverello of Assisi, was merely the most famous of scores of notable Christian heroes and heroines. The century as a whole saw the local or popular veneration of more than five hundred such people as “saints.”
Yet between 1200 and 1500 only forty new saints in all achieved canonization. The quasi-inquisitorial legal process …
Cont. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jun/19/intense-afterlife-saints/
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