The 4th of July is typically associated with America's Day of Independence. But it is also the feast day of St. Ulrich, a 10th-century prince-bishop of Augsburg in the Holy Roman Empire.
Like many saints, Ulrich led an exemplary life with ongoing charitable endeavors. But his case is truly special in Catholic history: When Pope John XV canonized him on July 4, 993, he became the first saint actually canonized by a pope instead of through local veneration.
This was a fundamental change in the way the Church handled sainthood. After all, for almost 1,000 years “the Holy See played little or no part in canonizing new saints.”
In the early centuries of Christianity, the faithful would commemorate a saint at the local level without much, if any, oversight from Church hierarchy. These early saints were commemorated on their feast days, typically the same date as their martyrdom (in this era, basically all saints died violently).
The making of a saint might involve taking the remains and relics from the initial burial site and relocating them to the local church. Or people might instead decorate the burial site or make a pilgrimage to the site of martyrdom.
By the early Middle Ages, there emerged saints who were not martyrs but had instead left behind a legacy of holiness through their lives, even though they had died a comparatively peaceful death.
During the Middle Ages, local bishops began to take a more active role in making saints. Some of these saints remained very local, while other saints saw their veneration extend across multiple locales. And some saints managed to spread across all of Christendom.
As the first Christian millennium came to a close, Church authorities began to feel there should be more regulation dictating who becomes a saint and how to commemorate their sainthood.
Even after the first formal canonization had taken place with St. Ulrich in 993, some saints continued to be made on the local level for almost another two centuries.
But by the late 12th century, Pope Alexander III was chastising bishops for having made saints of persons he regarded as unworthy. And in the year 1170, he declared that only popes could designate new saints.
Ensuing years saw the arrival of guidelines for how to determine a candidate's suitability for sainthood.
The emergence of beatifications in the 16th and 17th centuries brought further structure to the making of saints. There could be no canonization without prior beatification — and only the pontiff could decide whom to beatify and canonize.
The canonization process became a highly elaborate, some might even say grueling, affair that could go on for centuries and still not succeed. Even today, a number of blesseds have remained in their beatified state for hundreds of years without attaining canonized sainthood.
[Here it is important to note that canonization simply recognizes that a person is in heaven. All of those in heaven, whether canonized or not, are saints. Sometimes this designation is noted with a capital S for the canonized saints.]
The most notorious part of the process is probably the “devil's advocate” (today known as the "promoter of the faith"), whose role involves performing a thorough, critical examination of each candidate. The purpose here isn't negativity for its own sake. Rather, it's about protecting the Church.
After all, canonizations are infallible. There is no process of de-canonization. So if you canonize someone, you must be sure that no later details will emerge showing them as unsuitable for sainthood.
More than 1,000 years since his canonization, nothing disreputable has surfaced about St. Ulrich — a milestone in the saint-making tradition, whose July 4 feast day is indeed worthy of fireworks.
