Lorenzo Ruiz was born in 1600, tortured and killed by the Japanese in 1637 as a martyr for not renouncing his faith. His canonization was based on a miracle that took place in 1983, when Cecilia Alegria Policarpio, a two-year-old girl suffering from brain cancer, was cured after her family and supporters prayed to Ruiz for his intercession. She was diagnosed with the condition shortly after birth and was treated at Magsaysay Medical Center.
Ruiz was beatified during Pope John Paul II‘s visit to the Philippines in January 1995. It was the first beatification ceremony to be held outside the Vatican. San Lorenzo Ruiz was canonized by the same pope in the Vatican City on 18 October 1987, making him the first Filipino saint.
What is the cost of sainthood? Vatican officials made a startling discovery shortly after Pope Francis was elected in 2013: outside payments were routinely made to a small office in the Holy See to boost the prospects of a candidate for canonisation.
The overall cost to the Vatican involved in creating a new saint can be as high as €500,000 — and in one case hit €750,000 — because of the lengthy historical due-diligence involved in analysing a candidate’s suitability, including whether he or she has performed any miracles.
But those external contributions from individuals or groups — worth up to €40,000 — helped speed up the process. The trouble is they were often kept off the books and unaccounted for by the so-called postulators who worked in the sainthood office.
Vatican officials were forced to take the dramatic step of freezing the postulators’ accounts after they refused to hand over any documents.
The episode stands among the most damaging revelations from two books based on leaked documents — Avarice by Emanuele VI and Merchants in the Temple by Gianluigi Nuzzi, which have heaped further indignity on the Roman Catholic Church as it tries to rebuild its credibility.
The publications, rife with vulgar details of avarice and mismanagement, have raised questions over the pope’s ability to deliver lasting change to the city state’s notoriously murky governance, especially on the economic front.
They have also brought back a scent of scandal to the Holy See, reminiscent of the last days of Pope Benedict XVI’s tenure, when the German pontiff’s own butler was detained and tried for leaking confidential information. That scandal was known as “Vatileaks.” “Those who are less than enamoured of the current pope .?.?. are hoping its main effect will be to stop his reforming pontificate dead in its tracks,” said Robert Mickens, editor-in-chief of Global Pulse, the Catholic website.
“But Pope Francis is not Benedict XVI. He will not allow financial corruption at the Vatican or power struggles in the Roman Curia to sandbag his efforts to change the culture and refocus the vision of the Catholic Church around the world.”
Since many of the excesses revealed by the two authors predate the implementation of Vatican financial and economic reforms, begun under Benedict XVI and aggressively pursued by Francis, they do not undermine the Argentine pontiff’s image as a reformer.
Secret recordings of the pope, unearthed by the authors, disclose Francis’s dismay at the corruption under his watch, and his determination to try to get a grip on things.
But confidence in his ability to clean up such a corrupt and opaque system may nonetheless have been rocked, leading to a furious Vatican response to the books, including the threat of legal action against the authors. Overall, the Vatican’s real estate portfolio was estimated to be worth
€2.7bn, and, in many cases, housing was rented out to friends and acquaintances at prices well below market value.
One former Vatican official was accused of using funds destined for a Vatican-run children’s hospital in Rome to pay for a €23,000 helicopter ride to southern Italy and the refurbishment of his own flat.
Was there a fee paid for the canonization of St. Lorenzo Ruiz? The obvious conclusion is Nada!