A Process That Takes Itself Seriously
The Catholic Church does not make saints carelessly. This is worth stating plainly at the outset, because the temptation, when approaching canonisation from a sceptical position, is to dismiss the whole apparatus as theatre and move on. That would be an error, both intellectually and rhetorically. The procedure the Vatican has constructed over several centuries is elaborate, adversarial in its original design, and governed by rules that the Church treats as genuinely binding. There is a medical board. There is a postulator who assembles the case for the candidate. There was, until 1983, a figure formally known as the Promoter of the Faith, commonly called the Devil’s Advocate, whose institutional role was to argue against canonisation. The process has the architecture of a court of law, and the Church intends it to be taken as such.
The argument in this essay is not that the Church is hypocritical or that the process is fraudulent in any ordinary sense of that word. The argument is more precise and, in the end, more damaging than that. The Church has constructed a formal evidentiary procedure, applied it conscientiously, and it still cannot produce anything that would survive independent scrutiny outside the room in which the verdict is reached. The standard of proof applied is real, but it is not sufficient for the claim being made. Understanding why requires understanding the process first, and understanding the process requires taking it seriously rather than mocking it from a safe distance.
1. The Machinery of Canonisation: How It Actually Works
The formal path to sainthood in the Catholic Church runs through four stages, each with its own bureaucratic weight and theological significance. A candidate is first declared a Servant of God, which simply means that a diocese has opened a formal investigation into the person’s life and writings. This investigation is conducted locally and produces a dossier, which is then submitted to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints in Rome, the Vatican department responsible for processing these claims. If the investigation establishes that the candidate lived a life of heroic virtue, or died as a martyr for the faith, they are declared Venerable. This is a purely moral and biographical determination: no miracle is required at this stage.
Beatification is where the supernatural requirement enters. For martyrs, the Church waives the miracle requirement and beatifies on the basis of the martyrdom itself, treating the willingness to die for the faith as sufficient evidence of divine favour. For everyone else, the Church requires one verified miracle, and the miracle must have occurred after the candidate’s death and as a result of intercession specifically addressed to that candidate. This distinction matters enormously and tends to be underappreciated in popular accounts. The miracle is not merely evidence of the candidate’s holiness in a general sense; it is meant to be read as God’s own authentication of the cause, a divine signal that this particular person is indeed in heaven and capable of interceding on behalf of the living. The theology here is precise: the Church does not claim to make saints; it claims to recognise saints that God has already designated. The miracle is the mechanism by which God, according to this framework, announces the designation.
Canonisation, the final stage, requires a second miracle, again occurring after beatification and attributed to the candidate’s intercession. The cumulative evidentiary requirement for a non-martyr saint is therefore two verified miracles, each assessed separately, each required to meet the Church’s own standard of proof. When critics argue that the Church is simply rubber-stamping popular devotion, this is the structure they are ignoring. The procedure has genuine teeth, at least in principle, and the Church has rejected causes, demanded further investigation, and overturned preliminary judgements in the past.
The most recent significant revision of the process came under John Paul II in 1983, when the apostolic constitution Divinus Perfectionis Magister restructured the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and formally abolished the role of the Devil’s Advocate as a standing officer. Critics, including some within the Church, noted that this reform dramatically accelerated the pace of canonisation: John Paul II himself canonised 482 people, more than all his predecessors combined over the previous five centuries. The abolition of the Devil’s Advocate is relevant to any assessment of the process, because that role existed precisely to force the procedure to confront the weakest version of its own case. Its removal did not eliminate the adversarial structure entirely, but it weakened it measurably.
2. The Medical Board: What It Examines and How
When a miracle claim is submitted to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, it almost always concerns a physical healing. The Church does not exclude other types of miracle in principle, but in practice the overwhelming majority of claims assessed in the modern era concern recoveries from illness, and there are good reasons for this: physical healing produces medical records, and medical records are the closest thing to objective documentation that such a claim can generate. The process requires that the healing be sudden, complete, lasting, and inexplicable in terms of contemporary medical understanding. Each of these four criteria is formally assessed.
The medical board itself, known as the Consulta Medica, is a panel of specialists convened specifically to evaluate miracle claims. Its members are, by the Church’s own specification, required to be medical experts and are not required to be Catholic. This is a significant procedural point and one the Church is rightly proud of: the claim is that the medical assessment is conducted by people who bring genuine clinical expertise to the question of whether a recovery is explicable by natural means. The panel examines the original diagnosis, the medical records documenting the patient’s condition, the timeline of the recovery, and the subsequent medical history confirming that the recovery was sustained. They do not, at this stage in the process, ask whether a miracle occurred; their formal question is narrower and more defensible than that. They are asked to determine whether the recovery can be explained by known medical causes.
If the Consulta Medica concludes that the recovery cannot be explained by natural means, the case passes to a theological commission, which then considers whether the circumstances of the recovery, the prayer addressed to the candidate, the timing, the manner in which the healing was reported, are consistent with a divine intervention attributed to that candidate’s intercession. Only after both panels have delivered positive judgements does the case go to the cardinals of the Dicastery, and ultimately to the Pope, who makes the final determination.
The Church’s own published accounts of this process emphasise the rigour applied at the medical stage, and there is genuine rigour there, up to a point. The cases that are rejected are not trivial in number. Many claims fail because the original diagnosis was insufficiently documented, or because a natural explanation, even an unusual one, cannot be excluded. The procedure is not designed to pass everything presented to it, and it does not. This much should be acknowledged honestly, because the criticism worth making is not that the Church is running a sham operation with predetermined outcomes. The criticism is that even when the process works exactly as designed and produces a positive verdict, the positive verdict still does not establish what the Church claims it establishes.
3. The Standard of Proof: What “Inexplicable” Actually Means
The crux of the problem lies in the phrase “inexplicable by natural means,” and it is worth spending some time with this phrase because its limitations are not obvious until you press on them. When the Consulta Medica delivers a verdict that a recovery cannot be explained by known medical causes, what exactly has been established? The answer is something rather more modest than a declaration of miraculous intervention, and the Church’s own framework struggles to acknowledge the gap between these two conclusions.
Consider what “inexplicable by known medical causes” actually means in a clinical context. Medicine is not a complete science. There are documented cases of spontaneous remission in cancers, most famously in certain melanomas and renal cell carcinomas, that remain poorly understood even after decades of research. There are recoveries from conditions that were thought to be invariably fatal, attributable in hindsight to unusual immune responses, misdiagnosis, or interactions between treatments that were not anticipated. The boundaries of what medicine can explain expand continuously, and a recovery that was genuinely inexplicable in 1980 may be explicable in the light of research published in 2010. The Consulta Medica is assessing the case against the state of medical knowledge at the time of assessment, not against the state of medical knowledge at some hypothetical future point of completion. This is not a criticism of the panel; no panel can operate any other way. It is, however, a structural limitation on what the verdict can mean.
The transition from “we cannot currently explain this” to “this was caused by divine intervention” is not a small logical step; it is an enormous one, and the process does not actually require it to be justified. The Consulta Medica delivers its verdict on the natural question: can this be explained? The theological commission then takes the negative answer to that natural question and treats it as positive evidence for a supernatural explanation. But the absence of a natural explanation is not the presence of a supernatural one. This is precisely the structure of the argument from ignorance, sometimes called the god-of-the-gaps reasoning, and the Church’s canonisation procedure enshrines it at the centre of its evidentiary framework. The gap in medical knowledge is filled not with further investigation but with a theological conclusion that was available before the investigation began.
David Hume identified the foundational difficulty with this kind of reasoning in the eighteenth century, and his formulation remains the sharpest available. In the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he wrote: “When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.” Hume was not writing about canonisation specifically, but his framework applies with particular force to the process. At every stage where a healing is assessed, the relevant comparison is not between the miracle hypothesis and nothing; it is between the miracle hypothesis and a range of alternative explanations that includes misdiagnosis, spontaneous remission, delayed response to treatment, and the systematic tendency of human beings to construct causal narratives around events they find emotionally significant.
The Consulta Medica eliminates some of these alternatives, and the care with which it does so is genuine. What it does not do, and what no procedure of this kind can do, is compare the probability of a genuine miraculous intervention against the residual probability of an explanation not yet identified. The panel can say with confidence that it has not found a natural explanation. It cannot say with any confidence that no natural explanation exists. The Church, at the theological commission stage, treats the first conclusion as though it were the second, and this is the move that the procedure cannot justify.
4. A Specific Case: The Canonisation of John Paul II
Abstract discussion of the procedure is clarified considerably by examining a specific case, and the canonisation of John Paul II in 2014 provides one of the most thoroughly documented examples available. The miracle attributed to John Paul II that enabled his beatification in 2011 concerned Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, a French nun diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Following the death of John Paul II himself, who had suffered from Parkinson’s, the sisters of her congregation prayed specifically to the late Pope for her healing. Sister Marie Simon-Pierre reported that she woke on the night of 2 June 2005, found herself able to write legibly again (her handwriting had deteriorated severely as a symptom of her condition), and subsequently experienced a complete and sustained recovery. The Consulta Medica and the theological commission both assessed the case and delivered positive verdicts. The Vatican confirmed in 2011 that this healing had been verified as miraculous.
In 2007, reports emerged in the French Catholic newspaper La Croix that Sister Marie Simon-Pierre had suffered a relapse of symptoms and had been reluctant to speak publicly about her condition. The Vatican’s position was that whatever she was subsequently experiencing was distinct from the original condition, and that the original miraculous healing remained verified. Whether or not that position is correct on the medical facts, the episode illustrated precisely the kind of complication that a more demanding evidentiary standard would need to address. A recovery that was complete and lasting is one of the formal criteria. When questions arise about whether the recovery was as complete or lasting as initially assessed, the procedure has no obvious mechanism for reopening the verdict.
The miracle attributed to John Paul II that enabled his full canonisation in 2014 concerned a Costa Rican woman, Floribeth Mora, who had been diagnosed with a brain aneurysm and had recovered after praying to the beatified Pope. The initial medical consensus in the press coverage of her case described her condition as life-threatening and her recovery as remarkable. The Church assessed the case and delivered a positive verdict. Independent neurologists who reviewed the publicly available information noted that brain aneurysms vary enormously in their severity and their natural trajectory, and that a meaningful assessment of the miracle claim would require full access to the imaging data and clinical notes, not the summary information available in press reports. That full access was not publicly provided.
This inaccessibility of underlying data is a structural feature of the canonisation process, not an incidental oversight. The investigation is conducted under Vatican jurisdiction, the records are held by the Dicastery, and independent researchers have no right of access to the medical documentation that underpins the verdict. This is not a trivial procedural point. In any scientific or judicial context outside the Vatican, a claim of the magnitude being made here, that a physical recovery was caused by the intercession of a deceased person acting as a conduit for divine power, would be expected to survive independent scrutiny of the underlying evidence. The canonisation process produces a verdict that cannot be independently verified because the evidence on which it rests is not independently accessible. The Church is effectively asking the world to trust its own assessment of its own evidence for a claim that serves its own institutional interests.
5. What the Same Standard Would Be Worth Elsewhere
It is worth constructing the thought experiment explicitly, because it makes the problem concrete in a way that abstract criticism cannot. Suppose a pharmaceutical company wished to claim that a new treatment had produced miraculous recoveries in a cohort of patients. The company convened its own panel of medical experts, including some who were not employed by the company, and instructed them to assess whether the recoveries could be explained by known causes. The panel concluded that they could not. The company then declared the treatment effective on the basis of this verdict, without publishing the underlying patient data, without submitting the results to peer review, and without allowing independent researchers access to the clinical records. It would be immediately and correctly pointed out that this process, however sincerely conducted, does not constitute evidence of efficacy in any sense that regulatory bodies or the scientific community could accept. The panel’s verdict would be treated as the beginning of an inquiry, not the end of one.
The Vatican’s process is structurally identical. The internal panel is conscientious. The criteria are formally defined. The procedure eliminates some alternative explanations. But the evidence is not shared, the verdict is not subject to independent review, and the institutional body making the claim is the same one that holds the evidence and stands to benefit from a positive verdict. In any other domain where claims of this magnitude were being assessed, these features would be treated as disqualifying. The fact that they are not treated as disqualifying in the context of canonisation reflects the special deference that religious claims have historically been extended, a deference that cannot be intellectually justified once the procedure is examined on its own terms.
The Church might respond that the nature of the claim is different in kind from a pharmaceutical claim, and that the appropriate standard of evidence is therefore different. This response deserves a direct answer. The Church is not claiming that prayer produces a statistically significant improvement in health outcomes across a large population, which would indeed require a different kind of evidence. It is claiming something far more specific and far more extraordinary: that a particular deceased individual, acting in a specific relationship with the divine, caused a specific physical event in a specific person at a specific moment in response to a specific prayer. Claims of this precision and this enormity attract, rather than repel, the requirement for rigorous independent evidence. The more specific and the more extraordinary the claim, the more demanding the standard of proof must be. The Church’s process moves in exactly the opposite direction: the more extraordinary the claim, the more it is insulated from independent scrutiny.
Robert G. Ingersoll made a related point with characteristic directness, writing in 1883: “It is of no earthly importance whether he changed water into wine or not. All his miracles are simply dust and darkness compared with what he actually said and actually did. We should be kind to each other whether Lazarus was raised or not. We should be just and forgiving whether Christ lived or not. All the miracles in the world are of no use to virtue, morality, or justice. Miracles belong to superstition, to ignorance, to fear and folly.” Ingersoll was arguing from a different angle, namely that miracles are theologically superfluous, but his observation points toward the same structural problem. A process built around the verification of miracles inherits all the epistemological difficulties attached to miracle claims, and no amount of procedural rigour can dissolve those difficulties from within the procedure itself.
6. The Abolition of the Devil’s Advocate and What It Cost
The original design of the canonisation procedure included a genuine adversarial element. The Promoter of the Faith, the Devil’s Advocate, was an officer of the Congregation whose formal duty was to challenge every claim made on behalf of the candidate, to identify weaknesses in the evidence, to argue that reported miracles had natural explanations, and generally to make the strongest available case against canonisation. This role was not merely decorative. It produced formal written objections, to which the postulator of the cause was required to respond in writing, and the exchange of these documents constituted a structured adversarial record that the decision-makers could consult. The system was imperfect, as all adversarial systems are, but it was recognisably engaged with the problem of distinguishing genuine from spurious evidence.
John Paul II’s 1983 reform abolished the standing office of Devil’s Advocate and replaced it with a consultative structure in which theological and historical experts advise the Dicastery without a formal adversarial counterweight. The postulator’s office now takes on a larger role in assembling the case, and there is no longer a dedicated officer whose institutional purpose is to defeat it. The reform was motivated in part by a sincere desire to simplify an excessively bureaucratic process and to accelerate causes that had been stalled for decades by procedural complexity. These are legitimate goals. But the effect on the quality of the adversarial scrutiny applied to miracle claims is visible in the statistics: the rate of canonisation under John Paul II and his successors has been dramatically higher than under any comparable period in the Church’s history.
When an adversarial system removes the adversary, the verdicts it produces become systematically less trustworthy, not because the remaining participants are less competent or less honest, but because the structure no longer forces the weakest version of the case to be confronted and answered. A medical panel asked to assess whether a healing can be explained by natural means is doing important work, but it is not doing the work of an adversary who is actively trying to construct the most plausible natural explanation available. Those are different tasks, and a process that only does the first while claiming the rigour of both is overestimating its own conclusions.
7. The Attribution Problem: Intercession as a Causal Claim
Even if we were to grant, purely for the sake of argument, that a given healing is genuinely inexplicable by natural means, the canonisation procedure requires an additional step that is entirely invisible in its formal structure. The healing must be attributed specifically to the intercession of the candidate being considered for sainthood. This attribution requirement is theologically essential: without it, the healing would be evidence of God’s power in some general sense, not of this particular candidate’s presence in heaven and capacity for intercession. The Church needs the causal chain to run specifically through the candidate, because that is what the theology of canonisation requires.
How is this attribution established? The procedure considers the circumstances of the prayer: whether it was addressed to the candidate, whether it was made at a time and in a manner consistent with genuine intercession, whether the timing of the healing correlates with the prayer in a way that is suggestive of a causal relationship. These are the considerations that the theological commission weighs. But the attribution of a specific causal mechanism, divine intercession through a specific individual, is precisely the kind of claim that is least accessible to any form of empirical assessment. Medical records can document what happened to a patient. They cannot document who caused it to happen, and they certainly cannot distinguish between divine intervention through one deceased individual versus divine intervention through another, or between divine intervention of any kind and a natural process not yet identified.
The theological commission is not performing an empirical assessment when it evaluates attribution; it is performing a theological one. The question of whether Sister Marie Simon-Pierre’s recovery was caused by John Paul II’s intercession cannot, in principle, be answered by examining medical records, because the causal mechanism alleged operates entirely outside the domain that medical records can document. The commission’s positive verdict on attribution is therefore a theological judgement dressed in the language of an evidentiary conclusion, and the dressing does not change the underlying nature of the garment.
This is not a trivial distinction. The Church presents the two-stage process, medical assessment followed by theological assessment, as a compound evidentiary procedure in which the first stage establishes the inexplicability of the healing and the second stage establishes its supernatural cause. In reality, the first stage is doing genuine evidential work, however limited in scope, while the second stage is doing theological interpretation that is constrained by prior theological commitments. The distinction between “this recovery cannot be explained by medicine” and “this recovery was caused by the intercession of this specific deceased person” is not one that any procedure can bridge, because no evidence available to any procedure could distinguish between these two conclusions in a principled way.
8. What the Process Reveals About the Nature of the Claim
There is something genuinely interesting about the fact that the Church has constructed this process at all. The existence of a formal evidentiary procedure for miracle verification reflects a desire, presumably sincere, to distinguish real miracles from false ones, and to provide an institutional basis for a claim that would otherwise rest entirely on popular devotion and clerical authority. The Church is, in this sense, responding to a genuine epistemological challenge: if miracles can in principle be identified, there must be some criteria by which genuine ones are distinguished from apparent ones, and those criteria must be applied consistently.
The procedure is the Church’s answer to this challenge, and it deserves credit for the attempt. But the attempt reveals, rather than resolves, the underlying problem. The criteria the Church applies, sudden onset, complete recovery, lasting duration, absence of natural explanation, are criteria drawn from the domain of medicine and applied by medical experts. This is the right approach to the natural component of the question: does this look like a natural recovery? But the supernatural component of the question, was this caused by divine intervention?, cannot be addressed by the same kind of evidence, and the procedure does not actually address it. It simply assumes a positive answer once the natural evidence has been assessed, and this assumption is not the conclusion of an inquiry but the presupposition of one.
The process therefore reveals a fundamental feature of the miracle claim itself: it is not a claim that can be verified by evidence, because the explanatory mechanism it invokes is not accessible to evidential scrutiny. This is not a criticism specific to the Vatican’s procedure; it is a feature of all miracle claims. As Hume observed, the question is not whether we have found a natural explanation, but whether the probability of a miraculous one exceeds the probability of all natural explanations combined, including those not yet identified. No evidentiary procedure can answer that question, because the supernatural hypothesis makes no predictions that distinguish it from an as-yet-unidentified natural hypothesis. The two are evidentially indistinguishable, and a procedure that treats them as distinguishable is not doing what it claims to be doing.
This connects to a broader argument about the relationship between science and religious claims that is developed more fully in the essay on pseudo-science and the evidence of God. The canonisation process is a particularly clear instance of the general pattern: a religious institution borrows the language and some of the tools of empirical inquiry, applies them to a question they were not designed to answer, and then presents the result as though it had the epistemic status of scientific evidence. It does not. It has the epistemic status of a theological judgement that has been filtered through a medical panel, which is a rather different thing.
9. The Comparison with Scientific Peer Review
It is instructive to compare the canonisation procedure with the process by which extraordinary claims are assessed in the scientific literature, not because science is infallible, but because the comparison illuminates what rigorous independent scrutiny actually requires. When a researcher reports a remarkable finding, the expectation is that the underlying data will be made available to reviewers, that the methodology will be described in sufficient detail for the experiment or observation to be repeated or independently assessed, that the reviewers will be genuinely independent of the researchers making the claim, and that the finding will be subjected to challenge from people who are actively motivated to find flaws in it. The process is imperfect: peer review misses errors, fraud occurs, replications fail. But the structural features of the system, data availability, methodological transparency, genuine independence of reviewers, active adversarial scrutiny, are designed precisely to catch the kinds of error and bias that a closed, internally administered procedure cannot catch.
The canonisation procedure lacks all four of these structural features. The underlying medical records are not publicly available. The methodology of the Consulta Medica’s assessment is not published in a form that would allow independent replication. The theological commission is composed of people whose institutional commitments make them something other than genuinely independent. And there is no longer a standing adversarial officer whose job is to find the flaws in the case being made. A process with these characteristics is not positioned to catch the errors it is most likely to make: errors arising from motivated reasoning, from the systematic tendency to find what one is looking for, and from the absence of anyone whose institutional purpose is to look for what is not there.
None of this means that the Church’s experts are dishonest or incompetent. It means that the institutional structure within which they operate cannot produce conclusions that warrant confidence beyond the boundaries of that institution, because the mechanisms that would justify such confidence are absent. The members of the Consulta Medica may be excellent physicians. Their verdict that a recovery cannot be explained by known medical causes may be technically accurate. But their verdict, delivered within a closed institutional process without published data and without independent adversarial scrutiny, cannot carry the weight the Church places on it when it declares that a miracle has been verified.
10. The Deeper Question: Why This Process and Not Another?
One of the more revealing features of the canonisation procedure is what it does not consider. The process focuses almost entirely on physical healings, and when it does consider them, it requires that they be inexplicable by natural means. What it does not consider is whether there is any principled reason to expect miraculous healings to be concentrated specifically in people who prayed to a particular candidate for sainthood, rather than distributed randomly across the population of seriously ill people who prayed to any figure, or to God in general, or who prayed sincerely within any of the world’s other religious traditions.
If intercession through deceased Catholic saints is genuinely capable of producing physical healings that cannot be explained by natural means, this is a testable prediction in a broader sense than the canonisation procedure acknowledges. One would expect such healings to occur at a higher rate among people who prayed specifically to canonised or beatified figures than among equally ill people who did not. One would expect the rate of such healings to be higher in Catholic populations than in populations with no access to the theology of intercession. One would expect the characteristics of miraculously healed conditions to be drawn from across the full spectrum of serious illness, not concentrated in the specific conditions that produce the kinds of dramatic, documentable recoveries that are easiest to present to a medical panel.
None of these predictions is tested by the canonisation procedure, because the procedure considers only individual cases presented to it by postulators motivated to make the case for a particular candidate. It is not a systematic survey of outcomes among people who pray for intercession; it is a case-by-case assessment of the most impressive examples that advocates of a given cause have been able to identify. This is precisely the kind of selection bias that rigorous evidence assessment is designed to correct, and the canonisation procedure not only fails to correct it but actively incorporates it into the design. The postulator’s job is to find the best miracle claim available and present it in the strongest possible light. The Consulta Medica’s job is to assess that pre-selected case on its merits. The result is a process that is structurally incapable of distinguishing between “saints genuinely intercede to produce inexplicable healings” and “among all the healings that people attribute to saintly intercession, some will be sufficiently dramatic and sufficiently poorly documented to resist medical explanation.”
These are very different propositions, and the difference matters enormously. The first would be evidence of something genuinely remarkable. The second is exactly what one would expect to observe even if no miracles occurred at all, given a large enough population of believers, a wide enough range of medical conditions, and a procedure that considers only pre-selected cases presented by advocates. The canonisation procedure cannot distinguish between them, and a process that cannot distinguish between the hypothesis it is testing and its most obvious alternative explanation has not established the evidence required to justify the verdict it delivers.
11. On the Sincerity of Those Who Participate
A point that deserves explicit acknowledgement, because the argument in this essay is sometimes misread as implying otherwise: there is no reason to doubt that the participants in the canonisation process are sincere. The physicians on the Consulta Medica are almost certainly applying their genuine expertise as best they can within the constraints of the process. The postulators are almost certainly convinced of the causes they are advancing. The theologians on the commission are almost certainly engaging seriously with the question of whether the circumstances of a healing are consistent with divine intervention. Sincerity is not the issue here, and imputing bad faith to the individuals involved would both miss the point and undercut the argument.
The issue is structural, not personal. Sincere people operating within a flawed procedure will produce flawed conclusions, not because they are incompetent or dishonest but because the procedure does not have the features required to correct for the biases that sincerity cannot overcome. Motivated reasoning is not a character flaw; it is a cognitive pattern that affects everyone, including scientists, including sceptics, including the author of this essay. The difference between a scientific procedure and the canonisation procedure is not that scientists are more honest than Vatican theologians; it is that the scientific procedure is designed to catch motivated reasoning through mechanisms of transparency, independence, and adversarial scrutiny that the canonisation procedure does not possess.
The critique of the procedure is therefore not a critique of the people who operate it. It is a critique of the institutional design, and of the claim that a procedure with these structural features can verify something as extraordinary as a miracle. Believers in the pew who find comfort in the canonisation of figures they revere deserve neither contempt nor condescension; their relationship to the process is devotional rather than evidentiary, and that relationship has its own human logic. The critique lands on the institution and on the claim it makes about the evidentiary status of its own procedure. Those are distinct targets, and conflating them produces an argument that is both unfair and less effective than the one actually available.
12. What Would Actually Constitute Evidence?
An argument that identifies the deficiencies of the current procedure ought at minimum to gesture toward what a more rigorous one would look like, if only to demonstrate that the criticism is principled rather than simply obstructionist. What would constitute genuine evidence for the kind of claim the canonisation procedure is making?
The evidence would need to meet several conditions. First, it would need to be independently assessable: the underlying medical records would need to be available to researchers who are not affiliated with the institution making the claim, subject to appropriate patient confidentiality protections, but reviewable in principle by any qualified investigator who wished to examine them. Second, it would need to control for selection bias: rather than considering only pre-selected cases presented by advocates, the evidence would need to come from a systematic survey of outcomes across a defined population of people who prayed for intercession, compared with a control group of equally ill people who did not. Third, it would need to address the attribution question in a principled way: if intercession through specific deceased individuals causes specific healings, this should produce a pattern of outcomes that distinguishes it from both random variation and from other explanatory hypotheses. Fourth, it would need to survive adversarial scrutiny from people who are institutionally motivated to find flaws in it, not merely from consultants whose participation in the process signals a degree of prior agreement with its premises.
The Church could, in principle, commission or support research of this kind. The existence of large Catholic hospital networks and a substantial Catholic research infrastructure means that the institutional capacity exists. The fact that such research has not been conducted, and that the canonisation procedure has not been reformed to incorporate its findings if it had been, tells us something about the confidence the institution places in what systematic evidence would show. This is not a conspiracy; it is an institutional preference for a procedure that can deliver the verdicts the institution needs, over a procedure that might not. That preference is understandable from an institutional perspective. It is not consistent with the claim that the procedure constitutes genuine evidence of anything.
The honest position, which the Church’s own procedure gestures toward without quite reaching, is that the most that can be said about a miraculous healing in any individual case is that medicine has not yet explained it. That is genuinely interesting, and it ought to prompt further investigation rather than a theological conclusion. The further investigation might eventually produce a natural explanation, which would be unsurprising given the history of medical progress. Or it might not, which would be more surprising but would still not establish that the unexplained event was caused by divine intercession through a specific deceased individual, as opposed to being caused by any of the indefinitely many natural mechanisms not yet discovered. As the essay on the proof that never comes argues, the gap between “not yet explained” and “explained by God” is one that evidence alone cannot close, because closing it requires a prior commitment to a framework in which God is the default explanation for what science has not yet reached.
13. The Institutional Stakes
It would be naive to discuss the canonisation procedure without acknowledging the institutional function it serves. Saints are not merely theological categories; they are devotional anchors for communities, national identities, and religious movements. The canonisation of a figure associated with a particular country, religious order, or cause generates significant institutional benefits: it strengthens the bond between those communities and the Church, it provides a focus for pilgrimage and associated economic activity, and it signals that the Church is actively engaged with the spiritual lives of its members rather than administering a static heritage. These benefits are real, and they create institutional pressure toward positive verdicts that is independent of the evidence in any individual case.
The acceleration of canonisation under John Paul II is explicable, at least in part, by this institutional logic. A Church that was losing ground in the developed world and seeking to consolidate its position in the developing world had strong reasons to canonise figures from Latin America, Africa, and Asia at a rate that demonstrated its global reach and its responsiveness to local devotion. The 1983 reform that abolished the Devil’s Advocate made this acceleration procedurally possible. Whether it was the intended effect of the reform is a matter for Church historians; that it was an effect is visible in the statistics.
The institutional pressure toward positive verdicts does not mean that the verdicts are predetermined or that the participants in the process are consciously aware of performing an institutional function rather than an evidentiary one. It means that the structural conditions under which the procedure operates are not neutral, and that a procedure operating under non-neutral structural conditions cannot produce conclusions that should be accepted without independent verification. This is true of scientific institutions, of legal systems, and of journalistic organisations as well as of the Vatican. The canonisation procedure is not uniquely corrupt; it is subject to the same kinds of institutional distortion that all human procedures face, without the corrective mechanisms that other institutions have developed to address them.
14. The Broader Claim About Miracles
The canonisation procedure is a specific instance of a broader question: what would it take to establish that a miracle had occurred? This question is worth addressing directly, because the answer has implications that extend well beyond the Vatican’s procedures for identifying saints. The question of whether miracles occur is one that the Church treats as settled, and the procedure is designed to identify instances of a phenomenon whose existence is not itself under examination. But from the perspective of anyone who does not share the prior theological commitment, the procedure cannot establish what it claims to establish, precisely because the prior commitment is doing most of the explanatory work.
The Church’s position, stated plainly, is that miracles occur because God acts in history, that God sometimes acts through the intercession of saints, and that the canonisation procedure identifies cases where this has happened. The procedure is then presented as independent evidence for the last of these three claims, while the first two are treated as given. But if the first two claims are not established independently, the procedure cannot provide evidence for them by finding cases that are consistent with them. Any unusual healing is consistent with divine intervention if one already believes that divine intervention occurs; the consistency is not evidence for the belief.
This circularity is not a defect that a reformed procedure could correct, because it is not a defect of the procedure but of the epistemological framework within which the procedure operates. The framework treats the miracle hypothesis as the default explanation for what medicine cannot explain. In a framework that does not share this default, the same evidence is simply a case of unexplained medical recovery, which calls for further investigation rather than a supernatural conclusion. The framework determines the verdict before the evidence is assessed, and no amount of procedural rigour within the framework can change this, because the rigour is applied to the question of whether a healing is inexplicable, not to the prior question of whether inexplicable healings are caused by divine intervention. For a fuller treatment of why this distinction matters for any claim about God’s existence or action in the world, the essay on evidence versus faith develops the argument at greater length.
Conclusion: Rigour Without Reach
The Catholic Church’s canonisation procedure is, within its own framework, a genuinely serious attempt to apply evidentiary standards to a category of claim that most religious traditions do not subject to any evidentiary scrutiny at all. The Consulta Medica does real work. The formal criteria are genuinely demanding. The process has rejected cases that a less scrupulous institution might have accepted. These features of the procedure deserve acknowledgement, and withholding that acknowledgement would produce a critique less accurate and ultimately less persuasive than the one available.
But the procedure cannot verify what it claims to verify, and the reasons why are structural rather than incidental. The evidence is not independently accessible. The adversarial scrutiny is weaker than it was designed to be. The attribution of a healing to a specific supernatural cause is assumed rather than demonstrated. The selection of cases is determined by advocates rather than by systematic observation. And the fundamental move, from “medicine has not explained this” to “this was caused by divine intercession,” is not a move that any procedure can justify, because it crosses from the domain of evidence into the domain of prior theological commitment, and no amount of evidence on one side of that boundary can do the work that commitment is doing on the other.
The process reveals, more clearly than almost any other feature of institutional religion, the difficulty of bringing supernatural claims into contact with evidentiary standards. The Church has tried harder than most to make this contact, and the result is a procedure that looks like evidence assessment from the outside but cannot function as one from within, because the conclusion it is designed to reach is fixed before the assessment begins. That is not an indictment of the people who operate the procedure; it is a statement about the limits of what any procedure can do when the claim it is assessing is, by its own nature, inaccessible to independent verification. The Vatican has built a serious machine for a task the machine cannot perform, and the seriousness of the machine does not change the nature of the task.