Is it too soon to canonise 20th-century popes?
While they live, all popes are styled “Holiness”. The mode of address is a sort of “official” holiness, tied to the office of the Bishop of Rome. It tells us very little about the character of the man who holds the office.
In fact, relatively few of the men who kept the style while they lived have been raised to the honour of the altars after they died.
Recent Church history, however, has seen something of a glut of papal canonisations – that’s the name for the official juridical act by which the Church infallibly proclaims that a person is a saint in heaven, and may be called upon to intercede for the intentions of those who pray to them – including, most recently, St John XXIII and St John Paul II.
