The Pope deserves applause for this:
The Holy See press office said April 24 that the pope had authorized the extension of the liturgical cult of Blessed Margaret of Castello to the universal Church during a Saturday morning meeting with Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
She will now be inscribed among the saints via the procedure also called “equivalent” canonization, where the requirement for a miracle attributed to the candidate’s intercession is waived.
Margaret of Castello was born blind and with a severe curvature of the spine in 1287 in Metola, present-day central Italy. Her parents abandoned her in 1303 at a shrine in Città di Castello where they had taken her in hope of a miraculous cure. She was discovered by local townsfolk, who began caring for her.
She came in contact with the then recently founded Dominican order and was admitted to the Third Order of St. Dominic. While remaining a laywoman, she received a religious habit, which she wore for the rest of her life.
Go here to read the rest. The Saint of the Unwanted:
Figures, the one time you praise the Pope….
I’m just not comfortable with equipollent canonization. It’s not that I deny its validity, and I have no reason to think it was applied badly here. Just yesterday I was writing about how difficult the formal canonization process might become in our age of trillions of posts, threads, and other documents. So I’d be open to a change in the process. It’s just the small-c conservative in me that has a problem with it. The canonization process is about listening to God. If God wants to shout, he can do so with a miracle. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints are just the sort of people who listen for that. I’ve read that St. Margaret of Castello is associated with miracles, and maybe the canonization process should be open to considering miracles from a saint’s life. I don’t know.
All that said, we like the angels should rejoice every time someone is identified as being in Heaven.