Who was the worst Catholic saint?
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Be nonexistent. In Christianity’s early days sainthood was a matter of popular acclaim. When the church formalized canonization in the 13th century, the traditional saints were grandfathered in, but later historical review found no reliable information about many of them and some appeared never to have existed at all. One egregious example is Saint Josaphat, who supposedly was the son of an East Indian king who persecuted his Christian subjects. When it was foretold that his son would become a Christian, the king had him brought up in confinement, but the son converted anyway. Scholars eventually realized this was actually the legend of the Buddha tricked out in Christian disguise.
Then there’s Saint Ursula, said to have been martyred along with 11,000 virgin companions in 451 at Cologne. Although it’s possible some women were martyred in that city at some point, the notion of there ever having been 11,000 virgins in one place at one time ultimately proved too much for even true believers to swallow, and veneration of Ursula was suppressed.
Be bad, period. One’s attention is naturally drawn to recent examples, some of whom have merely been proposed for sainthood. Pope Pius IX was declared blessed, an interim step on the road to canonization, despite allegations of anti-Semitism. An attempt to do likewise for Pius XII was postponed over protests that he had done nothing to save the Jews during World War II. (For a particularly harsh indictment see John Cornwell’s 1999 book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII.) The question remains controversial and I won’t attempt to settle it, but I notice Pius XII’s defenders often fall back on the argument that speaking out would only have made things worse–as if things could possibly have gotten much worse than the Holocaust. Easy to say when you’re not the one on the hot seat, I guess, but there comes a point at which caution looks like cowardice. I’m just glad this guy’s not a saint yet.
