"normal saint-making procedures"

Am I wrong, or does everyone want and need and even demand a saint or two?

True, each may adore or decry the saints of others, but where full-frontal honesty obtains, where the heart relaxes its sometimes self-important grip, isn't there a saint or two in residence? Vast or venial

makes no difference ... still, there is a person or place or time or mind-set that is blessed and somehow beyond ... an ahh and at-last relief? Nirvana or NASCAR ... a sainted ground.

And where saints seem to be in short supply ... well, a little creativity never hurt.

In Rome, the Roman Catholic pope, Francis, cleared the way today for the canonization not just of former pope John Paul II, but also for another former pope, John XXIII. In the case of John Paul II, Francis gave his stamp of approval to a miracle attributed to John Paul. Approved miracles are generally a yardstick against which sainthood is measured.

But it wasn't miracles that put John XXIII on the fast track to canonization:

The Vatican said Francis had the power to "dispense" with the normal saint-making procedures to canonize him on his own merit, without a miracle.

In this, it seems to me that Francis and even the Roman Catholic Church reveals itself as a "man of the people."

Which one of us has not exercised the power to dispense with normal saint-making procedures -- the proofs that might otherwise be required -- as a means of enshrining some beloved person or realm? The yardstick strikes me as utterly human: "I love you, therefore you are a saint" or, perhaps more pointedly, "I love me, therefore you are a saint."

Nirvana or NASCAR, vast or venial ... not good, not bad ... just utterly human and worth keeping an eye on.