CANDIDATES for sainthood will be exonerated from the requirement to have performed a miracle under guidelines being considered by the Pope.

Already under fire from some Roman Catholics for running a “saint factory”, the Pope is preparing to overturn a centuries-old rule that candidates for canonisation must have performed “medically inexplicable” posthumous miracles.

The Pope, 84, has created 482 saints in his 26 years as pontiff — more than all his predecessors put together — and has beatified 1,337 people. He believes that “latter-day saints” offer a much-needed example at a time when Christianity is under threat from secularism and rival religions.

Abolishing the need for miracles would speed up the canonisation of some of the Pope’s favourite candidates, including Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was beatified last year. It could also revive plans to beatify Robert Schuman, the French-born founder of the EU, shelved earlier this year because of lack of evidence that anyone had been cured after praying to him.

The Pope last streamlined the beatification and canonisation process in 1983, when he decreed that martyrs — those killed for their faith — could be beatified without the need for a certifiable miracle.

Yesterday Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Archbishop of Genoa, disclosed that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Pope’s ideologial “enforcer” for two decades, had presented a formula for the abolition of the “the miracle clause” to the Pope. Cardinal Bertone said that there was a growing feeling in the Vatican that the need for miracles for both beatification and canonisation was “anachronistic”.

At present, candidates for beatification, which confers the title “Blessed” and is the penultimate step before sainthood, must be shown to have performed at least one miracle after death by curing the terminally ill in response to prayers of intercession. For sainthood, evidence of at least two miracles is required. Claims of miraculous cures are examined by a panel of five medical experts at the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, a Vatican body.

The panel, drawn from a pool of a hundred doctors and specialists, must conclude that the cure was “sudden, complete and permanent” and had no scientific explanation. Cardinal Bertone said what mattered was not whether saints had performed miracles but whether they had displayed “heroic virtues” and led an exemplary Christian life.

Il Secolo XIX, the Genoa newspaper, said the proposed “revolution in saintmaking” would upset traditionalists who regarded miracles as “one of the cornerstones of the Catholic faith”.

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