Word: saint
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...path to canonization, though streamlined these days, is still long and tortuous. Usually required, among other things, is proof of between two and four miracles as evidence that the saint is really in God's presence. In practice a candidate must also die a Catholic. When he visited Uganda in 1969, Pope Paul prayed at a sanctuary for Anglican martyrs at Namugongo, but that is as close as any Protestants have come to Rome's recognition...
...Protestant democratic usage, all faithful Christians are saints, as the word is used throughout the New Testament epistles. Thus a popular Protestant hymn notes that the "saints of God are just folks like me." But Protestants, like Catholics, do sometimes distinguish between the everyday and the heroic. Despite the criticism of his authoritarian personality and his patronizing attitude toward Africans that arose even before his death, Albert Schweitzer is still commonly considered a Protestant saint. So is the Lutheran martyr to the Nazis, Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Salvation Army Founder William Booth, African Missionary David Livingstone and Methodism's revered...
Austrian Catholic Theologian Adolf Holl also believes that the essentials the church sought in saints have not altered. The saint must exhibit a heroic degree of virtue akin to the asceticism that ancient athletes and warriors strove to perfect. And the works of a saint must be out of the ordinary, almost unique. He or she should have a charisma or aura, the kind of radiance that was classically symbolized by a halo. The life of a saint should display a certain personal serenity...
...Saints normally are not normal. "A saint has to be a misfit," says University of Chicago Church Historian Martin Marty. "A person who embodies what his culture considers typical or normal cannot be exemplary." Father Carroll Stuhmueller of Chicago's Catholic Theological Union agrees. "Saints tend to be on the outer edge, where the maniacs, the idiots and the geniuses are. They break the mold." Not all accept that description of a saint. Hewing closer to Protestant tradition. Church Historian Jane Douglas of California's School of Theology at Claremont insists that saints are no more, no less...
Perhaps the best definition of sainthood is one that draws remarkable agreement: the saint as a window through which another world is glimpsed, a person "through whom the light of God shines." It is just that light that many see in Mother Teresa...