The world of the political campaign is said to run according to its own, sometimes mysterious rules. The obvious objective, of course, is for your candidate to win, trouncing all comers while (in the best campaigns) maintaining civility with the other camps and honouring the precepts of the system.
There are many components of a true campaign: the schedules, the fund-raising, the endless meetings with influential men who can make or break your candidate; the research into your own candidate's past to discover any less-than-sterling conduct that could prove an unfortunate surprise at the last and crucial moment.
It's pitch, pitch, pitch. Our candidate is better suited, more in tune with the times, will perform better for the constituents, has a more enthusiastic following. Look at our candidate's record! Now imagine what our candidate will do in the future. The whole business is a particularly gruelling endeavour when your candidate has been dead for 45 years.
But that does not dim the hopes of crusaders called postulators, those whose job it is to campaign for the cause of sainthood for a favoured one. (In fact, being dead for at least five years is a prerequisite in this campaign.) The road to sainthood, decided at the Vatican solely and infallibly by the Pope, may be one of the most complex, lengthy and challenging legal processes in the world. It makes trifles such as the year-long American presidential campaign look, well, rather shallow.
Right now, there are 29 US candidates for sainthood. This is, in non-ecumenical terms, a very big deal because there are only four American saints, and just one of them - St Elizabeth Ann Seton - was born in America. In the United States, the Catholic
Church - with 61 million members - is raising a good deal of noise, arguing that it is time to recognise more American models of holiness.
With Pope John Paul II, they have a real chance. His more than 280 canonisations have created more saints than all of his 20th-century predecessors combined. "He is a beatification and canonisation enthusiast," said Lawrence Cunningham, professor of theology at Notre Dame University. "The Vatican is sending a message with these canonisations."
And right now, an intriguing front-runner has emerged. Her name is Sister Katharine Drexel, who was born a Philadelphia heiress in 1858 and died a former socialite and pauper nun in 1955. Her story is as unusual as that of a certain former Polish actor who one day became Pope.
But before you learn about Katharine Drexel's life, you must learn about her death's aftermath, what she has endured in the past 45 years during this process of saint-making. In 1964, nine years after her death, Katharine Drexel's name was submitted by John Cardinal Krol to the Vatican, and the petition for her "cause" as it is called, was begun. In real terms, the campaign was in its infancy. When the petition moved forward without Vatican objection, Drexel was designated "A Servant of God", a formal title that allows the real research to begin.
Every aspect of a person's life is examined and exhumed. "You don't want to find out later that somebody had a mistress," as Prof Cunningham says. Especially because the Pope's decision is considered infallible, great caution is taken. The modern Catholic church seems especially sensitive, given recent scandals. Scholars suggest that St Augustine, for example, would never survive the process today, because he once lived with a woman out of wedlock.
The ways in which a potential saint's past is investigated varies. In the cause of Mother Maria Kaupas, a Lithuanian-born nun who founded an order in Chicago, some 1,000 of her letters were translated from Lithuanian into English, a process that took nine years. Postulators for the cause of Father Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus, have scoured newspaper articles from the New Haven, Connecticut area from 1875 to 1890, accounting for Father McGivney's whereabouts every single week.
In cases where associates of the candidate are still alive - such as the cause of Mother Angeline Teresa McCrory, founder of the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, who died in 1984 - interviews are held. More than 70 witnesses will be called to testify on behalf of Mother McCrory.
Then comes the writing and submission of the "positivo" or position paper, a document that has been likened to an academic thesis. Part biography, part exhaustive documentation of letters, writings and associates' accounts, the positivo must also pass dogmatic muster. Prof Cunningham notes that this particular standard has generally ensured that successful candidates are not great theologians, nor are they given to flights of doctrinal discourse, much less eccentricity. Next may come the rather indelicate matter of exhuming the candidate's remains. In some cases, the church wants proof that the person actually existed, as it did in the cause of Toussaint, a Manhattan resident renowned for his work with orphans. A forensics team spent two weeks in 1995 removing Toussaint from his New York grave, and then used computer imaging to match the skull with an old photo. Toussaint was then reinterred beneath the altar at St Patrick's Cathedral, on Fifth Avenue..
If the candidate makes it this far, the cause is then submitted to the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints, a group of around 25 cardinals and bishops. If they and the Pope decide the candidate has lived a life of piety and virtue, they may designate the person "venerable". Now the real work begins.
To be considered for either beatification or sainthood, the candidate must be judged responsible for two posthumous miracles. And not just any miracle will do. The process and standards are exacting. A board of five doctors must conclude that there is no scientific or medical explanation for the miracles. And no half measures are allowed. Advocates for Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk Indian who was beatified in 1980, were disappointed when a subsequent "miracle" didn't win the board's approval. A blind priest who prayed to Kateri had only 90 percent of his sight restored. No go, said the Vatican. God does not work partial miracles.
Similarly difficult are cures for diseases such as cancer. The Vatican requires a minimum of 10 years after a cure for cancer, in case the cancer is merely in remission.
So back to Katharine Drexel. All of this campaigning, writing, and public relations (advocates seeking miracles must, after all, get the word out to followers to pray to the designated party) takes time, money, and organisation. It does not hurt to have friends in high places either. Advocates for Drexel admit her cause has not been hurt by the fact that Cardinal Anthony Joseph Bevilacqua, archbishop of her home town of Philadelphia, is a member of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
"No question they are doing a full court press. This process depends a lot on who is behind it. And they are well organised," said Prof Cunningham. "Plus, she really was an extraordinary woman."
On that last point there is no dispute. Katharine Mary Drexel was born into one of the richest families in America in 1858, one of three daughters of Francis Drexel, himself the eldest son of the founder of the investment banking firm of Drexel and Company, and also a partner of J.P. Morgan. Katharine's mother died a month after her birth. Two years later, her father remarried, to an unusual woman named Emma Bouvier (the great grandmother, incidentally, of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.)
Although their lives were much as one might expect of such a family - private education, vacations consisting of elaborate tours of Europe - Emma Drexel, a devout Catholic, spent two days a week inviting the poor of Philadelphia to her grand home on Walnut Street, distributing food and clothes. Only upon Emma Drexel's death in 1883 was it learned that she had also been quietly paying the rent for 150 poor families.
Her death, and the passing just two years later of Francis Drexel, left Katharine and her two sisters with a fortune of some $14 million dollars, roughly equivalent to $250 million today.
With an interest in American Indians and "negroes", Katharine Drexel began a life of philanthropy. By 1889, at the age of 30, she decided to enter a convent. Philadelphia society was aghast. The front page of the city's newspaper proclaimed "Miss Drexel Enters a Catholic Convent - Gives Up Seven Million".
In addition to vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, Drexel added another: "to be the mother and servant of the Indian and Negro races". Founding her own religious order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, she opened the first American Indian school in New Mexico. Altogether, she built more than 100 schools in rural areas in the south-west and deep-south United States.
Where racist white Southerners objected to Drexel's plans, she often arranged for land and buildings to be purchased in someone else's name. Other times more stringent measures were called for. In Texas in 1922, the Ku Klux Klan threatened to tar and feather and bomb the pastor of one of her schools. The nuns prayed. Within days, a tornado rose up and destroyed the Klan headquarters, killing two Klansmen. The KKK never bothered her again.
By the time she died in 1955, at the age of 96, Katharine Drexel had distributed more than $20 million, more than the original total of her trust fund. Her convent, Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, thrives today in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, and includes a few of the original nuns Drexel recruited from Ireland in the early part of the century.
It is those sisters, along with the Philadelphia archdiocese, who have spearheaded the campaign. And what a campaign it is. The mission's gift shop sells posters, videotapes, icons painted on wood for $20, and a Katharine Drexel Coloring Book for $2. They have a newsletter. You can even find her on the Internet.
The campaign for sainthood is expensive. Estimates are that such an effort costs around $500,000, but you will find no cynicism in the hearts of at least two families who credit Katharine Drexel with miracles of healing. In fact, the second of those healings was recognised as a miracle by the Vatican several weeks ago, clearing the way for a canonisation that is expected by on either September 3rd or November 5th, this year. IN 1974, an ear infection rendered 14-year-old Robert Gutherman completely deaf. After his mother's prayers, Gutherman, now 39, was cured. After analysis of X-rays and testimony by physicians, the Vatican recognised Gutherman's healing as a miracle in 1988.
Amanda "Amy" Wall was born deaf seven years ago. When Amy was four years old, her family obtained a relic from the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and touched it to Amy's ear. Shortly thereafter, the little girl began to hear. Asked at a news conference how clear her daughter's hearing really was, her mother Constance Wall laughed and said: "She can hear somebody say `cookie' from a mile away."
Constance Wall wept when she learned that the Vatican had recognised her daughter's case as a miracle on January 27th. "We are so thrilled," she said. "We thank Blessed Katharine for her intercession for our daughter and we thank God for the blessing of this wonderful miracle."
Now if only all campaigns could end this way . . .