If you had the ability to canonized one person, who would it be? They don’t have to be a martyr or even on the road to canonization. The only rule is that you can’t canonized yourself, family, or a non-Catholic. Who are you choosing?
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I would consider that to be judging the person if I canonized someone. There are people who, I am confident, are in heaven, but I wouldn’t make a definite statement about it on my own. As the Bible says, we look at the outside, but God looks into the heart.
Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa
If I were asked to “choose” someone to canonize, I’d have to frame it a little differently. Canonization isn’t ultimately a matter of my preference but of God’s will, discerned through His Church. So rather than imagining myself as the one doing the canonizing, I would pray that God might choose to reveal, through the Church, someone whose life He has already sanctified in a hidden way.
With that in mind, I pray that Maria Valtorta becomes canonized, because I sincerely believe she was an instrument God used to illuminate the Gospel and draw souls closer to Christ. If it were ever God’s will to confirm that publicly through the Church, I would rejoice. Until then, I simply entrust the matter to Him.
According to this article, it is claimed that since 2019 the Church has begun the process of proclaiming her Venerable. I take that as an encouraging sign, while still waiting on the Church’s formal discernment.
While I wouldn’t canonize, per se, I would at least try to start the ball rolling (and I am actively trying).
The Right Reverend John England of the Diocese of Charleston, SC (1786-1842)
While many modern scholars have condemned him for defending slavery, this is actually the opposite of what he devoted his life to. As the first Papal Delagate to the United States, he was required to present the Papal declaration to the American people which condemned the slave trade but allowed people already enslaved to remained enslaved. He was in the middle of a writing a series of letters describing the history of the Church and slavery when he died. Unfortunately, he was never able to finish his planned end to the correspondence in which he was going to advocate for the civil abolition of slavery and the dignity of those still held under slavery.
England’s life up to this point, however, showed that one of his primary concerns was the uplifting and dignity of the enslaved, while simultaneously calling for emancipation. He founded the first American religious order whose explicit charism included ministry to the enslaved, founded schools for the enslaved, nearly went to prison for teaching enslaved to read, and founded parishes primarily focused on the spiritual needs of the enslaved. Even when he was forced to segregate these slave-majority parishes by the local governments, he did not divide them front-to-back but side to side along the central aisle so that both enslaved and slaveholder would enter the church together and sit at equal prominence within the church.
In paragraph 176 of Pope Leo XIV’s recent Magnifica Humanitatis, he recognizes that while the papacy had historically affirmed slavery, there had been theological voices which helped the Church come to the full realization of universal human dignity and the absolute evil of slavery. Bishop England was one of those voices. He famously affirmed that slavery was, “the greatest moral evil of the modern age.”
Bishop England heavily shaped early American Catholic identity. He was the American Church’s first major theologian, public apologist, founded the nation’s first Catholic newspaper, was the first Catholic cleric to address Congress, and was the first to call for an American school for graduate theological studies (in 1829 at the First Provincial Council of Baltimore; the Catholic University of America was founded in 1887).
England’s theology, while controversial in his day, was eventually confirmed by the Church. His theology of Papal infallibility was confirmed at the First Vatican Council and his ecclesiology and attempt at liturgical reform was confirmed at the Second.
One attempt has already been made to start his cause for canonization but Msgr. Peter Guilday, England’s biographer and the person working on preparing his cause, died before he was able to officially initiate it.
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Bishop Fulton J. Sheen or Venerable Augustus Tolton.
I would cannonize Dennis Cullison. He taught me how to save me from myself.