Making Saints: How The Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes A Saint, Who Doesn'T, And Why » (New Edition)

Kenneth L. Woodward, a senior writer at Newsweek, has been the magazine's religion editor for thirty-two years. He lives in Westchester County, New York.

From inside the Vatican, the book that became a modern classic on sainthood in the Catholic Church.

Working from church documents, Kenneth Woodward shows how saint-makers decide who is worthy of the church's highest honor. He describes the investigations into lives of candidates, explains how claims for miracles are approved or rejected, and reveals the role politics -- papal and secular -- plays in the ultimate decision. From his examination of such controversial candidates as Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador and Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher who became a nun and was gassed at Auschwitz, to his insights into the changes Pope John Paul II has instituted, Woodward opens the door on a 2,000-year-old tradition.

Publishers Weekly

In a book the laity has awaited for 2000 years, Newsweek religion editor Woodward penetrates the esoteric process by which the Roman Catholic Church makes saints. He opens with the ``local politics of sainthood'' as exemplified in the candidacies of New Yorkers Terence Cardinal Cooke, who died in 1982 and whose cause is moving forward, and Dorothy Day, who died in 1980 and is unlikely to become one of the elect even though ``she did for her era what St. Francis of Assisi did for his.'' We're taken inside the Vatican office of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, whose denizens grapple with the complexities of canonization. We learn of the expense engendered by research into candidates' lives, the focus on required miracles, the rivalries of scholarly promoters. Canonization may strike some as an imprimatur for culthood but as Woodward shows, even in today's secular society saints matter. (Nov.)