The Big Question: What are the criteria for sainthood, and should John Paul II be canonised?

Surely he hasn't been dead long enough?  

In the old days, you had to wait a long time before they made you a saint. It was 500 years before they canonised Joan of Arc. But at the funeral of Pope John Paul II chants of santo subito - sainthood now - erupted. Two months later, his successor Benedict XVI announced he would waive the "wait at least five years" rule in John Paul II's case.

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Yesterday, on the second anniversary of the Polish pope's death, the findings of investigations at diocesan level in Krakow and Rome have been passed to the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of the Saints. If a panel of theologians and a group of cardinals and bishops give their approval, the case will then be sent to the Pope who could have his predecessor beatified - a halfway house to sainthood.

So what is a saint?

All times and religions, apart, perhaps, from Confucianism, have had their saints - exceptionally holy individuals who were felt to be close to God. The Jews had the tzadik, the righteous ones, who included the Macabees and the Prophets, to whom 50 sanctuaries have been discovered from ancient times. Hindus have the paramahamsa, which in Sanskrit translates as "supreme swan". Buddhists have the arhats, who have achieved nirvana. Muslims have the wali, "the friends of god".

What they all have in common is a sense that the living and the dead are connected - and that after death we continue to be part of the whole. It is a notion which survives in an attenuated secular form in the almost cultic status of Princess Diana.

Who decides you can be one?

In the early days, people were made saints by popular acclamation. Polycarp became one of the first in AD156 , when the faithful collected his bones after his martyrdom and developed the idea that the saint could speak to God on their behalf; he was a halfway house, close to God because of his holiness, but close to men and women because he shared their nature.

For the first 400 years you had to be a martyr to be a saint. But then confessors (outstanding teachers and bishops) and hermits and virgins began to be added. It was the acclamation of local people which was the deciding factor.

Eventually Rome got fed up with this. In AD993, the first saint to be declared by a pope arrived - Ulrich of Augsburg, who was pronounced by Pope John XV. Within about 200 years Pope Alexander III declared that no one should be venerated as a saint without the authority of Rome.

In 1734, Pope Benedict XIV set up a formal system requiring two miracles for beatification, two more for canonisation and a promotor justitiae (Devil's Advocate) whose job it was to thwart the proposed canonisation by any lawful means.

What are the criteria?

Interestingly, many saints were pretty rum characters who led odd lives which no one would want to imitate. Many were far from faultless in their behaviour. But their oddities and failings were greatly outweighed by the way they gave themselves to God "heroically".

The passing of time allowed their faults to fade, leaving only their "heroic virtue" in the general consciousness. A saint, as Ambrose Bierce put it, is merely "a dead sinner, revised and edited".

That said, the point of a saint, for the church, was that he or she offered a model of behaviour to the person in the pew who was far more likely to follow Christ by imitating a hero with a halo than by reading holy texts.

Aren't saints a rather outdated concept?

Reformers have long said so. Calvin, Zwingli and the rest were fierce in their condemnation of saints during the Reformation. The Church of England's Thirty Nine Articles speaks of the cult of saints as "a fond thing vainly invented", allowing Henry VIII to amass huge quantities of swag from the systematic looting of saints' shrines. (English art is much impoverished from the iconoclasm which destroyed countless statues, stained-glass windows, rood screens and murals.)

Anglicanism later decided that it wasn't saints who were bad, so much as what Thomas More called popular credulity, bizarre petitions and spurious relics, on which the pre-Reformation papacy fed. Mind you, Tertullian had complained about much the same kind of thing 1,000 years earlier.

Rome has had its attempts at reform. In the 1960s it downgraded saints such as St George, on the grounds that the historical evidence for his existence was weak, and St Philomena when it was found that her relics were not just bogus but, on closer scrutiny, turned out to be those of a man. Then in 1983 Pope John Paul II rewrote the rules again.

So what do the new rules say?

They halved the need for miracles to just one for beatification and then one more for canonisation. They streamlined the procedure and abolished the Devil's Advocate. They allowed John Paul II to make more saints than all the previous popes of the 20th century put together. He set 1,351 individuals on the road to sainthood; Paul VI did only 56 and the six popes before that just 80.

Did that make for better saints?

It made for saints that John Paul II liked better. Canonisation has always been a political process, and the last pope used it to promote his vision of the kind of Christianity he wanted. His saints mostly fit a particular ideological world view - which is why Mgr Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of the pietistic and reactionary order Opus Dei, has been beatified and the martyred advocate of the poor, Archbishop Oscar Romero, was not. He also honoured a Czech nun beheaded by the Nazis for refusing to remove crucifixes from hospital rooms, a young Italian woman who chose death over rape, and the stigmatic Padre Pio, whom two previous popes regarded as a fraud and whose photograph has even been found in the wallets of arrested Mafiosi.

He has made saints controversial. He fast-tracked Mother Teresa, beatifying the Nobel Peace Prize-winning nun only six years after her death, just as Pope Benedict is fast-tracking John Paul II. Such haste allowed contemporaries to recall that as well as caring for the destitute and dying, the "Angel of Calcutta" had some rather questionable friends among nasty Third World dictators.

That could happen again. There are many people with Aids in Africa, his critics will point out, who have no cause to give thanks to the Vatican and its policy forbidding the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV - or to the man at the helm when the disease reached pandemic proportions, even if he is now called St John Paul.

Should the late Pope be fast-tracked to sainthood?

Yes...

* There is a widespread movement among ordinary Catholics for his canonisation

* He bore his final illness with extraordinary fortitude and commitment to his church's teachings on the sanctity of life

* Though he had his faults, the criteria for sainthood allow those to be outweighed by his "heroic virtue"

No...

* It is too soon to make a judgement. The verdict of history needs to taken into account

* He changed the rules, halving the number of miracles required to qualify for canonisation. Two miracles is not enough

* His outlawing of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV means he was responsible for the deaths of huge numbers of people