New saints go marching in

Press, 27 August 1980, Page 21

New saints go marching in

By

JUDITH JUDD,

‘'Observer,” London

A new batch of Anglican saints, the first for more than 300 years, will take their places in the revised edition of the prayer book to be published this autumn.

William Wilberforce, leader of the fight against slavery, Josephine Butler, guardian of fallen women, John and Charles Wesley, the Methodists who were once banned from every pulpit in Britain, have all been admitted to the company of the church’s lessv.- saints.

The Church of England has approved no new saints since the 1662 prayer book was published and its most modem saint until this year was St Francis of Assisi (died 1226). St Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was around as long ago as 107 AD. The time had come, churchmen decided, to show that sanctity had not died in the Middle Ages.

In the Roman Catholic Church saints are canonised. The Anglican Church democratically elects them. The criteria are less exacting perhaps,

since miracles are not required. It is, as the Rt. Rev. Ronald Jasper, Dean of York, says, a fairly subjective matter. To reach the final roll call a saint has to receive the approval of the Liturgical Commission, the General Synod, and the House of Bishops. The most likelylooking candidates may fall by the wayside. “Even Florence Nightingale eventually bit the dust, and two other ladies were considered not quite suitable after very close investigation,” a church spokesman said. Josephine Butler, the mother of two who helped

rehabilitate nineteenth-cen-tury prostitutes, only reached the final list with the help of the House of Bishops who reinstated her after the Synod had thrown her out.

Nothing to do with the fallen women, according to the official version, just a case of the saintly calendar becoming a bit crowded and a feeling that she would get another chance in 20 or 30 years.

Dean Jasper emphasises that failure is not necessarily a sign that one man or woman is less saintly than another, it might be that someone has to be left out because too many saintly people were born on the same day. If the competition is between a Roman Catholic and an Anglican, the Anglican will obviously have the edge, though the new list takes proper notice of the twentieth-century ecuminical spirit with the inclusion of Sir Thomas More who died for Catholcism and the Methodist Wesleys whose revivalist “enthusiasm” once outraged the Established church.

Feminism, too, is catered for. One of the new saints is Julian of Norwich, the fifteenth-cen-tury woman mystic who held the fashionable notion that God is a woman.

The problems of saintmaking are considerable. It is thought important nowadays that a saint should actually have existed. Some saints created in the past are almost certainly'mythical. St George presents a particular headache.

“He is probably the diciest figure of all, but you can’t really chuck him

overboard because he is ■ the patron saint of England,” Dean Jasper says. The position of those who have done great work for the church, but whose characters were far from exemplary, is also tricky. There is a stong lobby for the demotion of St Jerome , who did a splended job translating the scriptures but was, by all accounts, a nasty piece of work. The point of the revision is “to reflect the continuing life of the church and show that sainthood is not confined to particular centuries,” Dean Jasper says. . ' .

Any bishop or any diocese can suggest at any time that it would like another name added. ~