OVERVIEW

Saint-making has been a major activity of the Catholic Church for centuries. Since the Catholic Church’s formalization of the saint-making process in 1588, persons beatified through 2020 include 749 confessors (who died peacefully after a virtuous life) and 5120 martyrs (who died due to hatred of the Church). The pace of sanctifications has picked up noticeably in the last several decades under the last three popes, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. Our goal is to apply social-science reasoning to understand the Church’s choices on numbers and characteristics of saints, gauged by location and socio-economic attributes of the persons designated as blessed. To carry out this research, we began by collecting long-term data on numbers and characteristics of blessed persons selected by the Catholic Church. The data apply to canonizations (final approval as a saint) and beatifications (a stage qualifying non-martyrs for canonization).

Pope Francis has sharply expanded the naming of martyrs, with a stress on Latin America. Our research seeks to assess the impact of choices of confessors and martyrs on the enthusiasm of the Catholic faithful. Using a comprehensive data set on Catholic martyrs (1588 to 2020), we have argued that the Vatican’s recent emphasis on martyrs is a strategic response to competition with Protestants, specifically Evangelicals. Our efforts to measure this effect are starting with the assembly of data on numbers of persons baptized by the Church over time and across diocese. We anticipate that the competitive strategy of naming blessed persons will be employed particularly when there is strong competition for membership from Protestantism, such as in Latin America in recent decades. Are beatified and canonized martyrs raising levels of adherence in Catholicism? If so, in which parts of geographic parts of the world.