Listing of Saints

  • Thread starter Thread starter BusterMartin
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
B

BusterMartin

Guest
Does anyone know where I might be able to find, either online or in print, a list of all the Saints and Blesseds of the Catholic Church (a listing including all Venerables and Servants of God would be wonderful also) of the Catholic Church? I assume that somewhere, besides the Vatican itself, would have an exhaustive list of such things, but I can’t seem to track it down. I’ve found some lists, like on catholic.org, that list a large amount of saints, but I assume that’s not “all” of them. This is for a project involving my diocese, but I haven’t yet contacted them yet since I was hoping to find it myself. I will contact them if no one here can point me in the right direction.
 
I don’t know of such a place. The Vatican might not even have it since early Saints were proclaimed by acclamation and were often regional since communication between Bishops (churches) was difficult.

You would also need to define which of the Eastern Saints to include and if you wanted to include all martyrs that would make and exhaustive listing practically impossible. Often the designation is “Saint X and companions” when converts are killed along with the missionary who may have been the only person who knew their names.

Can you tell us a bit about your project?
 
I do not think such a resource exists, nor do I think it even possible to create a complete list.
 
Mrs_Sally said:
Can you tell us a bit about your project?
Click to expand...
I can’t just yet. However, once decisions are made about whether or not to move forward with this project, then I can share. For now, things are a bit too up in the air to discuss more specifically.
 
Further thoughts:

You can check out a book called the Martyrologium Romanum. As far as I know it is only available in Latin, but it should be very easy to translate the names.
 
I don’t think such a list is out of the question. Certainly we’ll never know the names of some of the companions in martyrdom. However, I imagine that most of the saints who achieved their status through acclamation have been documented. In addition, such saints are probably a fairly small percentage of the total number of saints recognized by the Church. My understanding is that just in the pontificate of John Paul II, the number of saints was more than doubled.

I think the reason the Church does not have an official, comprehensive list of all saints is to avoid embarrassment due to the dubious status of certain early saints, a few of whom were poorly documented at best or merely legendary at worst.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top