Fast Track For A Sacred Cow

Agnes is part of a larger problem, though a prominent fang in the snake.

We were all treated this week, among the detritus of political campaign and megaphonic hairpieces, to the news that Pope Francis had officially recognized a second intercessory miracle attributed to the ghoulish figure of Mother Theresa. It startled me, as I had forced my knowledge of this dreary procession into the fog only to have it snapped back forefront by the fawning and wholly supportive litany of our news outlets.

Mother Theresa, whom I shall now be properly referring to as Agnes, is known to us as a benign and beatific figure. She has “Mother” in her self-granted title, affecting an elevated and benevolent position, and her relentless PR machine has done nothing for the last fifty years but embellish that persona while trying to keep her cruelty and hypocrisy a secret from us.

She has also been on the fast track to sainthood essentially since the moment of her death. The organization which bears her name, the Missionaries of Charity, continues to take in obscene amounts of cash from around the world while operating little more than death hotels. Claiming over four thousand nuns and nineteen of these horror show hospices in Calcutta alone, the last benevolent thing the sisters have done was to shut down adoption centers in India due to overwhelming religious intolerance. The intolerance, of course, originating with the sisters and directed at India's adoption laws, which do not exclude un- or formerly-married individuals.

Between then and now, the doddering form of Pope John Paul II claimed as authentic the story related by a woman healed of her cancer by intercession from Agnes's picture. The woman's doctors and husband told a very different story, but what need have we of doctors when glowing snapshots are among us? It comes as no surprise to read that the benevolent Missionaries of Charity are accused of illegally retaining the woman's medical records which document her year-long course of professional treatment, as well as pressuring the hospital staff to endorse this nonsense about miracles. The miracle that has just been recognized by the current Pope dates to 2008, and involved the same kind of nonsense around a Brazilian man's brain tumors. I unfortunately haven't been able to find any substantive article regarding actual details, but the Vatican Insider described it as “scientifically impossible.” The same Vatican, I remind you, that has never accepted or understood anything scientific until it was force fed to them. These things are on record, you can read as much about them as you can stomach. I describe them only to sketch out for you exactly what it is this dead woman is being credited with, and that these insulting and obviously delusional lies are what puts Agnes at the right hand of the creator she didn't believe in.

Agnes's personal documents reflected that she had no faith in the existence of God. The man responsible for examining those documents as part of the first step in canonization, Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, argues she was only having a half-decade “dark night of the soul” and that the cynical analysis of people like myself fails to properly understand her intent. But what other explanation could come from a representative of the nation-state responsible for both promoting and profiting from the never-ending victory lap Agnes seemed to be on? Incidentally, it's remarkable to me that the Vatican would not only allow her non-belief to become public, but that the clear contradiction between being a non-believer and a candidate for canonization seems to mean nothing.

Before the fourth century, the only saints were martyrs. If you wanted a seat in the VIP box, you had to die for your faith, preferably in a very public and painful way. Regional religious heroes, now including holy men who were conspicuously dead of natural causes, began to become venerated with approval of local bishops. This went on until 1170, when Pope Alexander the Stylish claimed any and all rights to canonization, because why the hell not. Three years later, it became actively illegal to venerate outside the Church's authority, with real-world laws to punish people for liking a dead guy just a little too much. Nothing particularly interesting to this conversation happens for quite a long time, until 1983 when JP II starts hacking bits off Alexander's game plan to streamline the process. One of the best bits to go was the dedicated position of opposition, someone responsible for the argument that the candidate for sainthood didn't deserve it. Arguments against can still be suggested, but to the best of my knowledge the Vatican no longer finds it necessary to challenge itself from within in almost any fashion.

The process begins with the potential saint's death, and before the first bureaucratic papers are shuffled a period of five years is supposed to elapse. This is to allow for fervor to die down, ostensibly to ensure that mob rule combined with the observable uptick in popular people's esteem after they die does not overwhelm what passes for reason at the Vatican. Agnes was not held to this tradition, as the examination of her writings – the first official step toward sainthood – began well before and was concluded by the time of her death. Following the examination and approval of the candidate's personal papers, their corpse is to be exhumed and examined. This is to ensure that no wacko cults have been messing around with the remains or using the tomb as a site for bizarre rituals, as well as the ritual lopping off of choice bits of the corpse to save as relics. You can almost swim in the irony, as well as feel a little sadness we never got to see the Pope chasing Agnes through the Vatican waving a pair of golden garden shears.

Once the Vatican ensures the candidate's corpse will stay where it is told and the choice cuts are securely pickled, the Pope publicly declares you a hero. It's really only an honorary thing at this point, as the candidate still doesn't get any feasts or churches named after them. It's worth noting that, at this point, the church will not acknowledge that the candidate is, in fact, in heaven at all. It seems counterintuitive, I know, to think that a person could be in line for sainthood without being in heaven, but nothing is so ironclad as a rule open to interpretation. There's some good news, though. The candidate can have their image graven across all kind of prayer-themed merchandise – probably nothing wrong with worshipping a graven image, after all – and use that merchandise to build a fanbase, thereby increasing the probability that some delusional person will credit their hallucinatory fantasy to the candidate's intercession. One could be forgiven at this point for thinking that this is less a somber and spiritual separation of the wheat from the chaff, more a brutally arrogant and solipsistic swimsuit contest judged on hysterical fervency and theocratic cheerleading.

We now reach the point Agnes had attained by the time of her death, attribution of miracles. Agnes shouldn't have even been considered for another half-decade, I remind you, but instead the Pope could not have thrown the miracle flag faster. It is at this third step in the canonization process that the church will finally publicly claim that the candidate's eternal being is ensconced firmly in the heavenly hereafter. Everything they preached from childhood indoctrination or adult conversion about how to get to heaven and avoid death was only the first part of the story. They withheld that not everyone would actually be getting MVP status, class warfare evidently being a problem in the afterlife as well, and that the path would involve years in whatever waiting room the Vatican prefers now – having renounced the horrific idea of limbo years ago – while guys in bathrobes read diaries and fiddle with corpses. Sounds fun to me, I don't know why they would bury the lead like that, but there you have it.

Beatification is attributed one of two ways, both on equally shaky rhetorical ground, I would say. Firstly, the candidate can be a martyr, meaning they died for their faith or as an act of heroic charity, presumably the bearing of another's mortal wound. Alternatively, they can be a confessor, the default position for saints these days. To be a confessor, it must be proven – for whatever that word is worth coming from the lips of a Pope – that the creator of the universe interceded directly to benefit a person who offered a prayer through the saint-elect, kind of like clicking through to Amazon from a website you like. These fraudulent miracle cures are well know to you, and they only proliferate due to the Catholic construct's unwillingness to repair the damage they have done in destitute countries without proper health care.

The final step before being fitted for a heavenly letterman's jacket is an encore miracle, which is why the ghoulish Agnes is currently in our public consciousness again. As part of JP II's streamlining process I mentioned earlier, part of the 800-year-old process left on the cutting room floor was the requirement of three intercessions. Currently only one additional conspiracy is required – the unfortunate man from Brazil – and the news is filled with fawning and completely complicit endorsement of the current Pope's thumbs up. No news outlet appears willing to state what is painfully obvious to honest thought: none of this is true, and it matters even less.

Despite the chorus to the contrary, the current Pope has done little to nothing regarding advancing the church into the 21^st century or guiding it to better mesh with modern society. Before Francis, Pope Benedict the Nazi-Faced threw open the pearly back door by validating locally venerated cult leaders at an unheard of pace; fanatics long dead, supported by the church, and with a large booster club who weren't waiting on the Vatican's approval or a cleared-up runny nose. Making a saint out of a monstrous woman who should be properly known for inflicting horrific dying conditions and absolutely no medical care whatsoever, in addition to being a well-known seller of indulgences to the most foul people you can imagine, will hopefully prove to be an unremovable nail in the Vatican's long-overdue coffin.