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St. Patrick’s Seminary and University, the century-old, palm-tree-dotted campus in Menlo Park, is home to the nation’s first Center for Sainthood Studies. The goal of the center is twofold: to demystify the process of sainthood in the Catholic Church and, in the year an American became pope, increase the likelihood of Americans becoming saints.
The center was approved in April by San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone, who oversees the archdiocese encompassing San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties.
The center currently offers a range of services, such as access to archival materials and grant-writing resources, designed to assist laypeople in navigating the multi-step process by which one becomes a saint, known as canonization. Next February the center will offer its first certificate program, designed and taught by canon law experts from Rome. The six-day course, open to a 50-person cohort of clergy and laity, will take place off-campus at the nearby Vallombrosa Retreat Center in Menlo Park.
The canonization process begins when a petitioner brings a sainthood candidate’s cause to the diocese where they died.
From there, the local bishop opens an extensive investigation into the candidate’s life, escalating their case through the church until that person is declared a servant of God, venerable, blessed, and finally, a saint by the pope.
“ We’ve created the center [to provide] a training facility so that people can have confidence and the resources that they need when they want to bring a sainthood cause forward,” said Michael McDevitt, the executive director of The Mystical Humanity of Christ. He became familiar with the process while promoting the cause of Cora Evans.
Born in 1904, Evans was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but converted to catholicism as an adult. Evans spent most of her life in Utah and was married at the headquarters of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City in 1924. After a decade of questioning her childhood religion, she would convert to catholicism upon hearing a Catholic priest on the radio. In the following years, she would go on to influence hundreds of Mormons to convert. In the 1940s, she and her family moved to California, where she would spend the rest of her life. The devout Catholic, mother and prolific writer died in Boulder Creek in 1957.
Half a century later, in 2010, McDevitt, the custodian of Evans’ writings, approached the late Rev. Richard Garcia of the Diocese of Monterey, who wrote Rome, formally beginning the process of recognizing Evans as a saint.
After two years of inquiry, the Vatican declared Evans a servant of God and issued an official declaration allowing the process to proceed.
In the years since, historians and theologians have combed through Evans’ life and writings, compiling a more than 5,000-page document on her candidacy. This document was shipped to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints in Rome for review in 2023.
“ It can seem like a very daunting task, especially if you’re a lay person, and you’ve never traveled down this track before,” McDevitt said. “[But] we made it through that.”
Now the investigation is in the hands of the Vatican and the process continues.
According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, there are 11 canonized saints of the US, although there is no comprehensive list of saints released by the Vatican.
In order to be declared a saint, a candidate must meet certain criteria, including having two miracles attributed to them that are approved by a church-appointed medical commission. Mother Teresa, for example, who was canonized by the late Pope Francis in 2016, is credited with curing a woman of stomach tumors and a man of brain abscesses.
“Ultimately, only God can make a saint,” McDevitt said.
Next year’s inaugural course at the Center for Sainthood Studies will walk participants through the canonization process, offering a historical and theological perspective on the causes of saints.
The course will place “a strong emphasis on canon law,” according to Emanuele Spedicato, a canon law expert and associate professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, who helped design and will be co-teaching the program.
“The main goal [of the course] is to offer basic but solid training for those involved in or interested in Causes of Canonization,” Spedicato wrote in an email. “Many people lack proper formation in this field, and the canonical complexity can be a significant barrier. The course seeks to address that gap by making the process more accessible and understandable.”
Spedicato added that the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints in Rome offers a one-semester formation program in Italian and that the Center for Sainthood Studies is not intended to replace that program but rather to “provide much-needed support, particularly for those working at the local level.”
“The ultimate hope is to reach as many people as possible and help promote not only the universal call to holiness but also the ‘canonizable holiness,’” Spedicato continued. “Saints are not limited to one state of life — they are men and women, young and old, clergy, religious and laypeople — showing that holiness is attainable by all.”
