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If people do good because they are human, not because God prompts them, is it right to risk giving God any credit when they alone own their good?

CANONISATION OF SAINTS IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

Psychoanalyst circles take about splitting.  Splitting happens when you see how  you are a mixture of bad and good and you hate being both at the one time for it makes you question the good you do and the rewards its brings.  You feel you are a fraud.  So what do you do?  You split the bad elements in your character off the good ones.  But they are still real.  You cannot deny that.  So you just start to see other people has having them not you.  So you condemn somebody's immoral sex life for it is what you want to do.   You refuse to see that you are as bad and you just project it on to them. 

What happens is you end up not seeing your own faults.  The corruption in you thrives for you are not dealing with it but projecting it to others.  You end up smug and superior.

Canonisation is what you get when a religion is splitting! The saint becomes a model for the righteous and a warning against the unrighteous.  The saint is both hero and weapon.

 The result is an exaggerated sense of one’s own virtue and innocence, but an equally exaggerated sense of the selfishness and corruption of others.The Roman Catholic Church says that our devotion should be for God alone. Yet it lets us honour our family and the priests and the saints. It is taught that the saints are special friends of God who are permanently in Heaven, where he lives, and they will enjoy him in moral perfection and holiness forever.

You can honour the saints without praying to them. The Church says that you can pray to these people so that they may pray for you. They are thought to have the power to influence God.

The Church says that canonisation is adding a person to the list of saints - the list of those the Church believes are in Heaven. The Church does not think that only those in the list are saints. There are saints who are not listed and who may never be listed.

The person to be canonised has to be prayed to and do a miracle to let the Church know he or she is in Heaven. A miracle is something that is not naturally explicable - eg a dead person coming back to life without medical intervention after three days. The Church thinks God does the miracle at the saint's request so that the Church will be able to present the person as an example of holiness to the Church and as a saint deserving of veneration.

That is very presumptuous.  It contradicts Jesus' command not to test the Lord your God.  It contradicts the notion that God has mysterious ways for we are not privy to his plans and cannot think like he does and know as he knows.  If the miracle proves the person is in Heaven it does not prove the person was a saint for what if the person was purified in purgatory and then went to Heaven?  And what if a prayer to a false saint is passed on to a real one or a real one deals with your request?  You never really know who got God to answer the prayer.  Maybe God just answered it anyway though it was addressed to a dummy saint.  Plus God is said to listen if a prayer from a soul in purgatory is made for you.  Plus miracles for canonisation are always cures but medical science is aware that equally or even more remarkable recoveries happen without any religious element.  Not only is the Church trying to test God but manipulate his evidence.  Demons or at least paranormal entities could be doing the miracles when they are not as godly as they look. For that reason a miracle cure that happens after a prayer to a saint for a miracle healing or any kind of healing does not mean the prayer had anything to do with it.  The argument that a miracle healing when a healing was asked for not a miracle one is a response to prayer makes no sense.  Religion has to pretend that prayers for healing can result in miracles for it does not want to encourage people to pray for miracles for it will get into trouble and so will they.

The Catholics pray to the saints and sing hymns of praise to them. This is based on the notion of the communion of saints. The saints in Heaven and the members of the Church on earth are connected together through God's presence so that they are aware of each others needs and willing to help.

Praying to the saints is the same as pagans praying to inferior gods, gods who are below the top gods. The Catholic claim that the saints are not gods does not ring true. They claim that they pray not to a saint but through a saint. But if it is really just a way of praying to God, then it follows that you cannot say the saints prove their sainthood by getting God to do miracles. It would follow that the miracle happens because God is honoured and not the saint.

The Catholic Church checks out people proposed for canonisation and if they are proved worthy and miracles are done after their death through their intercession it will beatify them – give them the title blessed - and then maybe canonise them when they get the title Saint. Reasons for Hope, chapter 3, explains that the Church does all this to be as sure as possible before making a person a saint.

"The canonisation of saints, that is, the final judgement that a member of the Church has been assumed into eternal bliss and may be the object of general vernation. The veneration shown to the saints is, as St. Thomas teaches, “to a certain extent a confession of the faith, in which we believe in the glory of the saints” (Quodl. 9, 16) Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma.  It is in fact best seen as proclaiming a person to be the faith in person.

St Alphonsus believed that it was heresy to say that anybody canonised by the Church could be canonised in error (page 23, The Great Means of Salvation and of Perfection). Many top theologians argued that it was next door to heresy to doubt the validity of any canonisation. This is nonsense because if the Church can be split by having two or more plausible claimants to the papacy why couldn’t it get canonisations wrong for they are not that important? Also as for the miracles St Vincent Ferrer who was the most famous miracle worker of all time and allegedly the most powerful miracle worker ever was in fact a member of the excommunicated rival Roman Catholic Church led by anti-pope Clement VII in opposition to the faction that Rome recognises as the true Roman Catholic Church. The man the Church believes was the true pope, Urban VI excommunicated his rivals supporters as schismatics, excluded from the true Church, and the Catholic Church still has the nerve to say that miracles only happen in the true Church and show us who the true saints are! Vincent’s miracles were intended to draw people into the false Church.

Some Catholics may disagree but to disagree is to deny that the true Church alone matters. Roman Catholicism claims that the true Church matters above all things for it is the pillar of the truth and protected by God from error and is the only Church that can be trusted for it is the only authorised way provided by God for getting one into heaven.

The Roman Catholic Church believes that we should pray to the saints in Heaven. They say that this is just asking a saint to pray to God for you so you are really praying to God. That is a lie for what do they want the saint for then? Do you ask the doctor’s mother for a prescription? The idea is that the saint has a better chance of influencing God than you have. God will only do something if it is for the best but here we are told he can do it not because it is best but because a saint asked him. This is blasphemy. The saints are really demons and stronger than God if they can talk him into doing wrong. If you think you are not good enough to approach God and have to go to a saint then your prayer must be good enough when the saint listens to it so God should listen to it. The Virgin Mary is reputedly the greatest of the saints and the most powerful. When morality is what is best how can it be moral to pray to a lesser saint?

When you honour the Roman Catholic Mary it is not her you intend to honour but a power that is over God - a demon would accept this adoration for they want you to think of them as better than God.

This tells us that the practice of waiting until a candidate for sainthood does miracles which are verifiable before canonising is foolishness because these miracles could only proceed from the Devil or overactive papal imagination. When Mary is the best saint there is no point in canonising any others.

The Church allows praying to people to test them if they are saints but what if they are in Hell?

The Bible calls all Christians saints. The Catholic practice of canonisation seems ridiculous. The saint has to do miracles before the Church will canonise. But the recipients pray principally to Christ and invoke canonised saints and so one wonders how they can be so sure the miracle commands the person be canonised. The saints liked to hide their virtue and would have despised the idea of doing miracles to get canonised. When they hid it how can one be sure they had virtue? If a miracle verified a false saint the miracle would be regarded as satanic so the process of saint making is riddled with inconsistency and is all just superstition and bad logic at the end of the day. It is weird how the Church relies on memories about saints and their motives – a notoriously unreliable method of being sure they were outstandingly holy and then canonises them if somebody reports a miracle after praying to them as if that was the only possible saint they prayed to? What about the persons who prayed for them in the name of other might-be saints or canonised saints? The Church believes what it wants!

No matter how good a person is, they have almost no chance of being canonised unless they do a miracle after they are dead. So why bother investigating a person’s life then? Why not just worry about the miracle instead? It is bizarre how many in the Church say that the pope cannot err when he makes a saint and they agree that the miracle can be disputed with good reason. The Church says it cannot add to the gospel so the miracles are not essential for belief.

The requirement for miracles is basically saying that we know a person is a saint from the evidence of their life but we still need miracles performed seemingly as a result of their intercession. It sounds awful and uncharitable if evidence for a person's goodness can be considered to be insufficient and then to require a miracle before one is satisfied! And especially coming from a Church that claims it is a duty to think the best of people and which has gospels where Jesus said the Jews were guilty of a great unforgivable sin for not being satisfied and content with the evidence of his good works and were still suspicious that he was in league with Satan. Now if the evidence of the person's life is unsatisfactory or incomplete the Church will not go by any miracles reported of that person. So it follows the miracles are pointless. The evidence of the life is what is important. The miracle isn't needed at all if the evidence is satisfactory. There is no obligation to believe in the miracle. The reality of the miracle is one thing but there is no way to be sure that the person's saying the miracle was done only in response to a prayer to the person proposed for canonisation is correct information. Satan can inspire people to lie. Catholics can be sceptical about the miracle being a miracle if they find reason. They can doubt that it really had anything to do with the person proposed for canonisation. All that underlines the total uselessness of the miracle. We are not saying that if God cures gangrene in a miracle that this is useless. We are not saying being cured of gangrene is useless but we are saying when God uses a showy and miraculous way of curing it instead of doing it in more natural looking style that this showiness or supernaturality is useless and pointless. The Church is saying, "God we believe this person is a saint and should be canonised but it shouldn't be done until you do some miracles through that person's intercession. Please do a few miracles through her or his intercession and then we may proceed and get this person made a saint though we don't really need them." That is really the sin of putting the Lord your God to the test condemned so strongly in the Old Bible and Jesus said it was a sin for Satan wanted him to test God and Jesus refused quoting the Bible in support. True Christians will say that if you test God to perform a miracle and there is a response that the person doing such a miracle is Satan himself or the miracle was based on some mistake or delusion and was not supernatural.

Miracles are supposed to confirm the true religion revealed by God. The Church claims that to confirm a true Catholic as a saint by the power of miracle is to indirectly confirm Catholicism as the true faith. The prime confirmation is given to the person who experiences a miracle or whose prayer results in one. If somebody who sees prayer as prayer to men and women more than to God and a miracle happens when they pray to somebody who is not yet canonised but for whom a movement for canonisation is in vogue then it follows that this is confirming that person's belief that saints are better than God. Though saint worship does imply that saints are better than God the Church officially cannot accept such a position. So the miracle is confirming a belief that is against Catholicism's official teaching. The Church never checks things like that out. It prefers to encourage the hasty and superficial assumption made by Catholics that the miracle is confirming true correct Catholicism. The Church only uses miracles to trick people into accepting the Catholic faith and to make them fear the fires of Hell which is reserved for those who disobey the faith and who refuse to join it.

St Maximilian Kolbe, a priest who offered his life to save a married man from death under the Nazis and who was then executed, was canonised without doing any miracles. The Church said that his life was miracle enough.

A person who failed to do any miracles when they were alive should not be canonised for after death there is no way to be sure it was a miracle or whose intercession or even what was responsible.

The Church used one miracle to justify Pope Francis declaring Pope John XXIII a saint.  In 1966, Sister Caterina Capitani had a stomach full of tumours.  Her spleen and pancreas had also to be removed.  A lot of surgery took place.  A seeping hole appeared several days later and she put a relic of the pope on it  She saw the pope in a sort of dream: “I wondered whether it had been a dream” (Allegri 2014) and lived a normal life after.  It is known she had fever and there is no evidence that the seeping came from a whole and the mess there can be explained by her vomiting on herself.  The tumors were removed by medical science and there is no documentation about the doctor who diagnosed her wound, fistula (Allegri 2014). Who cares if there was a hole or fistula for it had nearly two weeks to heal!  This rubbish miracle is what the Church accepted!

Sister Marie Simon-Pierre Normand was supposedly cured by Pope John Paul II of Parkinsons.  She went into remission in 2005 and ceased her medication.  It is not clear that all her symptoms were down to Parkinsons.  We don't know for sure if her diagnosis was correct for many illnesses mimic Parkinsons.  Plus she was very interested in the pope's symptoms and her own seemed to imitate his.  That suggests a bit of mind over matter.

Normand's illness returned in 2010 (Hooper 2010). Relapse is always a sign that a miracle was not really a miracle.

Floribeth Mora Diaz from Costa Rica was claimed to be healed of an incurable and inoperable “cerebral fusiform aneurysm.”  She had headaches and in 2011 a neurosurgeon gave her that diagnosis.  She claimed that when she gazed on a picture of John Paul II in a newspaper that her condition suddenly vanished.  She has an exaggerated view of how serious her illness was.  If she reduced her blood pressure that would make her feel better and there is little concern about such an aneurysm causing harm.  Needless to say there is a shortage of data on her diagnosis which means there is scope for her to pretend or imagine or claim to have been worse than what she was.  The problems did not stop the Church recognising her miracle or Sister Capitani's as being a sign that John Paul II was a saint.

Many of the canonised saints were rabid anti-Semites and had visions that the Church never accepted as real and even rejected. Many engaged in savage self-abuse like St Mary Maddalena De Pazzi and St Margaret Mary Alacoque who reported visions about the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Church says that their sanctity is provable regardless of their error. But the more sensible a saint is the more likely they really are sainted. Their sanctity cannot be proved when their crimes are interpreted as errors. Saints are an argument for the holiness of the Catholic Church. But if deluded people who mean to be sincere Catholics but who are really heretics can be saints this is impossible so there should be Protestant saints.

The canonised saints were mostly renowned when they were alive for the strength of their prayers and how they could get God to do miracles for people. These miracles imply that the saint heretically believes that he or she is so righteous that God blesses through her or him. This is heresy for the Bible forbids such pride. This makes the miracles demonic.
  
The Church ignores the fact that most of the canonised saints moaned day and night about how evil and sinfully vile they were. The Church puts this down to them seeing even the slightest sin as serious though not as mortal sin. But if you have attained a tremendous level of sanctity it follows that your sins are worse than they would be if an ordinary person committed them for you are desecrating that sanctity and have less excuse for sin. The rebellion is very serious and it is hard to see how it could not be mortal sin. It comes down to intention. If you see your “tiny” sins as huge and very serious then they are serious sins. It is a mortal sin to inflict depression on yourself therefore when you know that you will react very strongly if you commit a sin then the sin is mortal because of that. The saints should not have been canonised at all.

Today saints who have not been donor card carriers are canonised. Their organs go to waste when they could save up to seven lives. Obviously though the Church has the nerve to protest against contraception in the name of respecting human life, it doesn't care about it except when sex is involved.

Canonising saints has more to do with promoting their fanatical obedience to the Vatican than anything else. They are used as political items. They are good propaganda and so are set up to function as Catholic exemplars with their subservience to the Vatican. The Church forces the title on the saints whether they want it or not without concern for what they want for it is herself alone that she cares about.