Patience lacking in sainthood

She was a comparatively young woman to die. In her 50s, they said, but she had been ill most of her adult life. Cancer. Not as common then, in the late 1930s, as it has become now. But did that matter? Not to her husband, two sons and two daughters.

She dominated all five in a way then common where the Irish mother was concerned. And indulged herself shamelessly, having tea in china cups with the schoolteacher and favoured neighbours while her husband slaved in the fields on their few small acres. She was also very devout. Her favourite saint was Philomena. Philomena's young bones had been found in a catacomb in Rome in 1802 and she was believed to have been an early Christian martyr from the third century.

Philomena's bones were taken to a parish near Naples where the local priest entered her saintly remains in a place of honour in his altar, for she was believed to have been a saint of the early church. A cult grew around her, promoted primarily by Jean Vianney, cure of Arles in France. By 1835 the Congregation of Rites in Rome had entered an office (prayer) of St Philomena in the Mass.

How Beatrice, the sick, strong, indulgent, devout woman who died of cancer in January 1939, became aware of Philomena is not clear. Nor does it matter. Throughout those tortuous final years she prayed earnestly, fervently, pleadingly to St Philomena for relief from the pain eating at her body as she withered away. In the rural Ireland of the 1930s there was little else to do about great pain.

Beatrice kept a St Philomena scapular around her neck as she lay dying. Her family kept it afterwards as a powerful reminder of those awful last years and the great suffering of a much-loved mother.

On January 18th, 1961, the Congregation of Rites in Rome announced that St Philomena had never existed. Her biography, written by the priest who had brought her bones to his parish near Naples, was described as having been based on dubious visions. It was "an imaginative account".

Beatrice's youngest son, Tom, was a very young man when she died. In 1961, when Rome pronounced, his faith was shaken to the very core of his being. It never recovered. Within a short time he stopped attending Mass and has never done so since except for occasional funerals and a few Christmases. To do that in the early 1960s amounted to self-ostracisation in a community where everybody went to Mass. It was unpopular and unprofitable. But such was the effect of the elimination of St Philomena from his life. Or, rather, his dying mother's life.

In the immediate years afterwards other saints were to join the disappeared, including the popular St Christopher.

But if the Vatican had adopted a springclean, minimalist approach to saints in the 1960s, all has changed significantly since. Pope John Paul has canonised 282 and beatified another 821. Pope Paul VI canonised 84. Pope John XXIII canonised just 10. Pope John Paul has canonised more saints than all the 20th-century popes combined.

There is no particular explanation for this largesse, nor is there any apparent fear that some day another Philomena could emerge from such haste-to-canonisation, with, perhaps, similar despairing consequences for the likes of Beatrice's son.

It used to be the case that 50 years had to elapse before anyone was considered for sainthood. That is now down to five years. For one person it has been reduced even further. The process for the canonisation of Mother Teresa began last month. She died two years ago next month. In defence the Vatican has pointed out that St Anthony was canonised in 1231, a year after his death, while St Francis of Assisi was canonised in 1228, two years after he died.

Already two miracles attributed to Mother Teresa are being investigated. One proven miracle and a person is declared Blessed, two and they are canonised. It is said the Vatican would like to see Mother Teresa canonised next year.

She fulfils most of the criteria associated with the other people canonised under Pope John Paul. She was a Catholic, she was a celibate, she was white, she founded a religious order, and she was orthodox doctrinally. Where she differs from the great majority is that she was a woman. Indeed it may be one of her attractions for a papacy now determined to show its even-handedness where women in the church are concerned despite (possibly because of) its inability to accept them as priests.

None of this is to suggest Mother Teresa is in danger of becoming another Philomena. We know she existed. We saw her with Gay Byrne on The Late Late Show. But who knows what may emerge? Already she has been accused of lending respectability to such as dictator Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti and Robert Maxwell of Mirror Newspapers, by accepting donations from them.

A former nun in her Missionaries of Charity, Susan Shields, an American, has written of how Mother Teresa's "twisted premises strangle(d) efforts to alleviate misery." She also alleged that most large donations to Mother Teresa sat unused in her bank account.

None of which proves anything against Mother Teresa. But it does indicate that the Vatican should move slowly towards canonisation. It should tread softly, remembering it is dealing with someone likely to attract a large following as a saint.

People like Beatrice and Tom would be devastated should Mother Teresa be "found out" at some future date. I know what that sort of thing can do and that there is no cure for the confidence it shatters. Beatrice was my grandmother. Tom is my father.