Word: sainthood
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...come a national folk hero. Barbara Walters nags him for an interview. He twinkles, touches another match to one of his hundred or so pipes, and declines. International bankers claim, perhaps extravagantly, that his reappointment is needed to steady the stumbling dollar. American businessmen have raised him to near sainthood, even those who do not necessarily agree with all of Burns' tactics but want him to stay. Housewives, engineers and preachers write Burns that the nation needs him. He has become a soft-voiced beguiling problem for Carter...
Pope Paul VI approved a decree this summer citing "the heroic virtues" of Father Damien, the first step on the road toward sainthood for the Belgian-born missionary. Famed for his devotion to victims of leprosy in Hawaii, Father Damien followed a calling that led to his death from the disease. Now the leprosarium that he made famous, Kalaupapa, is dying of attrition-and for the most welcome reasons: new cases of the disease have become rare among ethnic Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians, and leprosy can be treated so successfully today that newly identified patients soon become noncontagious. The savage...
John Nepomucene Neumann,* who on June 19 becomes America's third Roman Catholic saint, was no ecclesiastical superstar, but a priest of simple piety and workaday faithfulness. So much so that Vatican officials who screen candidates for sainthood nearly overlooked him. They shelved his case in 1912 because of serious doubt whether he had displayed the necessary "heroic virtue...
...Just a few hours before that meeting, the main opponent of Neumann's canonization collapsed and died in a barber's chair. Benedict subsequently designated Neumann as Venerable (worthy of veneration and a proper recipient of private prayers)-the beginning of the long process to sainthood. In doing so the Pope set a precedent for the future judgment of possible saints by declaring: "Even the most simple works, performed with constant perfection in the midst of inevitable difficulties, spell heroism in any servant...
...Neumann's deep spirituality, not the buildings, that fostered a campaign for sainthood, beginning six years after his death. Once he was pronounced Venerable in 1921, the next stage was to be named Blessed, which meant that two healings were certified by the Vatlican as miracles attributed to Neumann's intercessions in heaven. One further healing was required for sainthood. The church provides these accounts of the Neumann miracles...