Pope Won’t Hurry Holocaust Report, Teresa Sainthood
Pope John Paul II on Thursday ruled out intervention to speed up possible sainthood for Mother Teresa.
Aboard the papal plane en route to Brazil, John Paul was asked whether he planned to change the Roman Catholic Church’s rules for canonization. Five years must pass after a person’s death before the process can begin.
“I think it is necessary to follow the normal way,” John Paul said.
After Mother Teresa died last month, there was widespread speculation over whether the process would be speeded up.
On another issue, the pope indicated that a long-promised church document on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust was far from complete.
The document was promised in 1987 to Jewish leaders angered by the pope’s reception of then-Austrian President Kurt Waldheim after his role in the German army during World War II came to light.
John Paul was asked if the document would come out of a Vatican meeting this month of Catholic theologians to discuss the Christian roots of anti-Semitism.
The theologians must be listened to, the pontiff said, to “see what they say, and to decide what to do with the results.”
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