What country has the most saints?

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I’ve seen the claim in several places that Korea has the 4th largest number of Catholic saints (and it never cites any source, even Wikipedia articles!)

So, where does one find some kind of Top 10 list of nations with the most Catholic (and/or Eastern/Oriental) saints?

Been googling around, coming up with nada.
 
Nothing scientific, but according to one unofficial scan of Wikipedia category pages, the countries in descending order look something like this: Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Greece. Then it drops from there.

However, I would take that with a bit of a grain of salt, because there are group celebrations. Take England, for example. Wikipedia lists 67 under its category of English saints, but there are the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, which is classed as only one entry in the category page. This should up the total to 106.
 
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Yeah I saw that Wikipedia page too. It’s not much of a guideline because 1) there are only articles for saints that are the most well-known—or, that someone with free time just happened to create an article for, so that’s going to be very uneven, and 2) as you pointed out, a single article might be for “The 205 martyrs of Japan” or something.

I’d certainly bet that the oldest historically Catholic countries also have the most martyrs; Italy, France, Ireland, etc. but I’m very curious if anyone out there has any real numbers / statistics on this. The idea that Korea is 4th (primarily because of the large number of martyrs) makes me wonder what other surprises there may be. 🤔
 
One problem is that the Church has no official list of canonized saints. In the early Church, sainthood could be declared at the local level.
 
tractarian said:
I’ve seen the claim in several places that Korea has the 4th largest number of Catholic saints (and it never cites any source, even Wikipedia articles!)

So, where does one find some kind of Top 10 list of nations with the most Catholic (and/or Eastern/Oriental) saints?

Been googling around, coming up with nada.
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The country with the most Saints is the Heavenly Country 😉 The term “heavenly country” is a term used in Catholic tradition.
 
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Well that does make it a bit harder, but there’s also some pretty comprehensive lists / databases of saints around nowadays, like http://catholicsaints.info 🙂 which does organize its saints by several categories & groups. On that particular website, nationality / country-of-origin isn’t one of them…yet.
 
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