Chapter 17 2 min read
Sanctity, Canonization, and Posthumous Vindication
From the minimally refined research manuscript
Canonization shows in a concentrated form how Catholicism distinguishes moral evidence, divine attestation, and ecclesial judgment.
Thomas explicitly mentions the Church's use of miracles in connection with recognizing sanctity.
The distinction is precise.
A canonization miracle is not supposed to mean:
“Every proposition this person ever uttered was correct.”
“This person belongs among God's holy ones and can be invoked in the communion of saints.”
This principle rescues Catholic miracle theology from enormous amounts of confusion.
The miracle validates what God intends it to validate.
Not whatever apologetic conclusion an observer happens to attach to it.
Lambertini treats the objection that heroic virtue should matter more than spectacular signs. He cites traditions insisting that signs do not themselves make a person righteous and that upright life is more fundamental than marvels.
He then rejects the opposite extreme as well: making miracles the sole or sufficient proof of sanctity. The canonical practice instead demands both the virtue or martyrdom and the truth of the signs.
This creates an important epistemic sequence:
first establish the candidate's life / heroic virtue / martyrdom
then
ask whether God has subsequently attested that judgment through miracles.
Lambertini explicitly responds to the charge of vicious circularity. The Church does not prove virtue from miracle and miracle from virtue in one closed loop. The investigation of virtue or martyrdom precedes the miracle phase; the miracle then strengthens and certifies an independently established judgment.
So canonization evidence is convergent, not circular.
That coheres with a cumulative-case epistemology of Catholic miracles generally.
This is one of Lambertini's most important refinements.
Miracles performed or mediated during a person's lifetime do not provide a certain argument for that person's sanctity, because even sinners can sometimes participate instrumentally in miraculous works that confirm Christ, a true doctrine, or some other divine good.
Posthumous miracles are different. If God performs a genuine miracle in response to invocation of a deceased servant of God, its hagiological meaning is much more determinate: it can serve as divine attestation that this person is alive in God and worthy of invocation.
This is exactly why the present theory needs a distinction between:
agency, occasion, intercession, and object of vindication.
The person through whom a miraculous effect happens is not automatically the person whose sanctity is being certified.
Aquinas, ST II–II, q. 178, a. 2; Lambertini, De Servorum Dei IV.1, chs. V–VI.
A closer look
Questions raised here.
How can invocation, prediction, timing, location, relics, devotional focus, and surrounding circumstances identify the object a miracle is alleged to attest?
They provide what might be called the event’s evidential address. Lambertini’s canonization analysis shows this particularly clearly: if one servant of God is explicitly invoked and an extraordinary effect follows in the appropriate circumstances, the invocation helps identify whose intercession is at issue. If several saints are invoked indiscriminately, attribution becomes weaker or underdetermined. Likewise, a prediction fulfilled at the relevant time may be more semantically specific than an event arbitrarily associated with a claim decades later. The point is to establish the miracle in individuo, with respect to the particular object allegedly attested.
Can a miracle attest the truth of a doctrine without attesting the holiness of the person through whom it occurs, or attest holiness without validating everything that person believed?
Yes, and the manuscript regards this as indispensable. A sinful preacher could be involved in a miracle confirming something true without thereby being declared holy. Conversely, a miracle attesting a saint’s sanctity does not turn every private theological, political, scientific, or prudential opinion of that saint into revelation. Doctrinal vindication and hagiological vindication have different objects. The evidential conclusion must therefore remain indexed to the thing attested.