Beatification is the Catholic step that can still be paused
Declaring someone a saint is treated by most Catholic theologians as infallible and permanent. The step before it, beatification, is not. It grants a revocable permission for local veneration, which is why the Vatican has occasionally halted a beatification only weeks before the ceremony when troubling new information surfaced.
The word joins the Latin for blessed and to make. A beatified person gains the title Blessed and may be honoured publicly, but only in a particular diocese, country or religious order. Kateri Tekakwitha's feast, for example, was kept in the United States and Canada after her beatification, and John Duns Scotus was honoured mainly among Franciscans and in Cologne. A canonised saint, by contrast, is venerated by the whole Church.
For centuries the title came from below. Popular acclaim made local Blesseds, and bishops could beatify on their own authority until 6 July 1634, when Pope Urban VIII reserved that power to Rome. The modern rules date from 1983: unless the candidate died as a formally recognised martyr, one miracle attributed to their intercession must be confirmed. Such miracles are nearly always medical cures that doctors cannot explain, examined by panels of physicians and theologians.
The legal distinction was set out most fully by Benedict XIV in an 18th-century treatise still regarded as the classic reference. Canonisation is a command binding Catholics everywhere; beatification is a permission, and a preparatory one. Theologians stress this does not signal doubt about the person's salvation, only that the decision lacks the finality needed for an infallible act. One Roman cardinal summed it up as an administrative act.
That flexibility has been used. In 2005 Pope Benedict XVI suspended the planned beatification of the French priest Léon Dehon after antisemitic passages in his writings were highlighted, and the case stayed unresolved for years. Archbishop Fulton Sheen's beatification, set for December 2019, was postponed shortly beforehand so bishops could review his handling of clergy assignments; his cause later resumed. The pace has also varied: John Paul II, pope from 1978 to 2005, proclaimed more saints and Blesseds than all his predecessors since 1588 combined, and his own beatification in 2011 drew more than a million people.
Source: Beatification
