Pope Leo XIV Will Streamline Canonization Process With "Canonizations by Tweet"
The Congregation for the Causes of Saints Will Also Become A For-Profit Organization
In his first few weeks as Supreme Pontiff, Pope Leo XIV has already made numerous major changes to the Vatican. We’ve covered many of them here on this site, such as the new “Novus Ordo” Vatican website rolled out last week, replacing the Traditional Vatican Website, appointing Susan From the Parish Council alongside a bunch of other women to head Vatican dicasteries, and crowning Donald Trump as the Holy Roman (err Holy American) Emperor.
Alongside “disunity” in the Church that has led bishops in places like Charlotte, NC to “ban Catholicism”, another problem Pope Leo XIV faces is the Vatican’s finances, which are just about as bad as they were in the flailing times of Pius XI a century ago when the Pope signed a concordat with Mussolini’s Italy in order to survive financially.
The current leaders of Italy aren’t willing to make a similar deal, and even though Trump will chip in a bit to the Vatican in exchange for being crowned emperor, there just aren’t options to make a similar deal today.
Indulgences are also off the table as a revenue source, as are investitures and selling bishoprics and cardinalates, due to how thoroughly Pope Francis stacked the college of cardinals and the dioceses to bursting with bishops.
So Pope Leo’s advisers proposed a novel new revenue source to the new pontiff that he will soon be putting to use: ramping up the Canonization Industrial Complex with a new streamlined canonization process for the Church with the outcome to be decided and announced by X post or Tweet alongside the Congregation for the Causes of Saints officially becoming a for-profit organization.
Pope Leo XIV laid the groundwork a week ago by appearing to canonize Pope Francis implicitly in this tweet, but according to some in the Vatican, the change isn’t really that novel.
“It’s how we roll here,” announced the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pagolin. “But we’ve been mass-producing saints for free for far too long. Sainthood is a valuable thing that religious orders, dioceses, families, nations, political parties, and more are willing to pay a significant amount for. Currently, we only canonize a few dozen people per year. If we could bump this up to a few hundred and charge a few million for each canonization, we could quickly fix the Vatican finances, even if we do spend a little of it pretending to investigate their lives. We’ll drop the requirement for miracles, of course. That was always patriarchal and oppressive. Expecting female saints to perform the same number of miracles as men just isn’t how we do things in 2025. We’ll just drop that requirement and replace it with a quick poll. If we find a few people who want such and such guy to be a saint, we’ll go ahead with it.”
The ultra-streamlined canonization by Tweet process will take less than 24 hours to complete, from the time that someone recommends a name to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and pays the requisite fees to the official announcement and proclamation of canonization in an official Tweet on X from the Pope.
”Don’t worry, the process is still infallible. It just takes a little money to grease the wheels of infallibility,” added Cardinal Pagolin. “Recommend your friends today. Isn’t it amazing how many new saints we’ll be mass-producing,” he added.
The new process is expected to lead to a “more diverse” representation of future Catholic saints, with fewer martyrs being canonized and far more non-Catholics, heretics, and even atheists to be canonized,” CNN reports.
Traditionalists like Dr. Kwasniewski,
, and are “concerned” about this change to the process, and even outlets like EWTN “don’t like” the fact that the Congregation for the Causes of Saints will become a “for-profit” organization. “It just doesn’t ring right,” said Raymond Arroryo on the EWTN News Nightly. “Are canonizations the new indulgences. Will heroic virtue really be proven by means of a focus group study?The Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) has decided to continue to not decide on whether the new canonizations are valid or not and will split the difference by recognizing any saints to be canonized through the process as “holy men or women generically” while also including their souls in the prayer intentions of that day’s Mass.
Vatican finances, however, are not expected to improve, as the extra money will be immediately spent covering shortfalls caused by lost USAID revenue on programs such as the expensive "Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion” and “Female Altar Server” programs.
