Road to sainthood: Vatican panel clears John Paul II for canonisation

 Pope John Paul II has cleared the final obstacle before being made a saint, awaiting just the final approval from Pope Francis and a date for the ceremony that could come as soon as 8 December, a Vatican official and news reports said on Tuesday. 

The ANSA news agency reported that a commission of cardinals and bishops met Tuesday to consider John Paul’s case and signed off on it. A Vatican official confirmed that the decision had been taken some time back and that Tuesday’s meeting was essentially a formality. 

One possible canonisation date is 8 December, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, a major feast day for the Catholic Church. This year the feast coincidentally falls on a Sunday, which is when canonisations usually occur. 

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised by the church to discuss saint-making cases on the record, confirmed reports in La Stampa newspaper that John Paul could be canonised together with Pope John XXIII, who called the Second Vatican Council but died in 1963 before it was finished. 

There is reasoned precedent for beatifying or canonizing two popes together, primarily to balance one another out. 

John Paul has been on the fast track for possible sainthood ever since his 2005 death, but there remains some concern that the process has been too quick. Some of the Holy See’s deep-seated problems — clerical sex abuse, dysfunctional governance and more recently the financial scandals at the Vatican bank _ essentially date from shortcomings of his pontificate. 

Defenders of the fast-track process argue that people are canonised, not pontificates. 

But the Vatican in the past has sought to balance concerns about papal saints by giving two the honor at the same time. Such was the case in 2000, when John Paul beatified John XXIII, dubbed the ‘good pope,’ alongside Pope Pius IX, who confined Jews to Rome’s ghetto, condoned the seizure of a Jewish boy and allegedly referred to Jews as dogs.