BUT MAYBE Pio’s sainthood shouldn’t be so surprising. His canonization fits right in with Pope John Paul II’s conservative political agenda. Indeed, the politics of canonization have become overtly conservative under his pontificate. Early on in his tenure, the pope gutted the traditional process of canonization by abolishing the office of the Devil’s Advocate (a Vatican official who would voice all the arguments against canonization) and changing the rules for the number of miracles needed for canonization. (Prior to those changes, multiple miraculous works — usually cures of dire physical illnesses that cannot be explained by science — were required of those put up for sainthood. Historically, candidates needed two miracles for beatification and two for canonization. They now need only one for each.) While this might appear to be a progressive streamlining of the old-time Vatican bureaucracy, the reality is that it has made it easier for John Paul II to approve canonizations. Indeed, since his ascension to the Chair of Peter in 1978, John Paul II has canonized 283 new saints — more than were sainted in the 407 years directly preceding him. And they haven’t been just any saints. John Paul II has canonized those who fit his highly conservative political agenda.

In keeping with John Paul II’s strong anti-communism, for instance, he beatified four men in 2001 who had been murdered under the Soviet regime: Nikita Budka, who died in 1949; Josaphat Chichkov, who died in 1952; and Metodio Domenico Trcka and Kamen Vitcher, both of whom died in 1959. His frequent denunciations of South and Central American radical "liberation theology" were backed with appropriate saints: this year the Vatican beatified Maria Romero Meneses, a wealthy Nicaraguan nun who supported the Somoza regime and worked with the upper classes to help the poor. She died in 1977. Juan Diego, a peasant who died in 1548 and reportedly saw a vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1531, was beatified in 1990. He was canonized this year and praised by the pope for humbly accepting his station in life. Of course, a decade passed before the name of left-leaning Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero — killed by right-wing assassins while saying Mass in 1980 and regarded by many in his country as a saint and martyr — was even allowed to be entered on the list of those put up for beatification.

The pope’s political prejudices were also evident in his 2001 beatification of the Martyrs of Valencia — pro-Franco clergy and lay people who died during the Spanish Civil War. Particularly notable was his treatment of Josˇ Mar’a Escriv‡ de Balaguer, a well-known Spanish anti-Semite, crucial supporter of Franco’s fascist regime, and founder of the right-wing Roman Catholic organization Opus Dei. De Balaguer died in 1975; he was beatified in 1992 and will be canonized in October of 2002. While he never openly supported Hitler, he was widely quoted as saying, "Hitler against the Jews, Hitler against the Slavonic, means Hitler against communism." (These beatifications and canonizations are particularly striking given that, in 1962, Pope Paul VI had placed an interdict on proceeding with the cause of the Spanish Civil War martyrs because he did not want to be seen as favoring the Franco regime.)

Perhaps most notorious in recent years, though, has been John Paul II’s promotion of saints who were killed by the Nazis. Two priests — Maximilian Kolbe (who died in 1941 and was beatified in 1971) and Titus Brandsma (who died in 1942 and was beatified 1985) — caused some to comment that the Church sought to Christianize the Holocaust. Kolbe’s case in particular drew the ire of Jewish groups, since as a writer and magazine editor in Poland, Kolbe had promoted the belief that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was not an anti-Semitic forgery but the work of "a cruel, crafty, little known Jewish clique" who had let themselves "be seduced by Satan."

But the charge of Christianizing the Holocaust became an international cause cˇl¸bre with the beatification of Edith Stein in 1987 and her canonization in 1998. Stein was a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism who became a Carmelite nun, taking the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She was arrested in 1942 and died in Auschwitz — not because she was a Catholic resisting Nazism, but because she was Jewish. At the end of her life Stein wrote a "spiritual will and testament" that asked God to accept her life "for the atonement of the unbelief of the Jewish people and for this: that the Lord may be accepted by his own people [Jews] ..." Stein’s canonization was met with enormous opposition from Jews and many Catholics who felt that the Vatican was cynically and immorally canonizing as a martyr a woman who was executed for being Jewish. Jewish leaders worried that John Paul II was going to use the canonization of Stein to start a Vatican campaign to convert Jews. Even worse, many suggested, the Vatican sainted Stein to combat increasing criticism of that era’s pope — Pius XII — for failing to take a strong public stand, befitting his high spiritual office, against the Nazis or the Holocaust. These complaints were not baseless. In his homily at Stein’s canonization, the pope claimed that when Stein converted from Judaism, "she discovered that truth had a name: Jesus Christ." To make matters worse, one section of his homily was titled "Only the Love of Christ Makes Us Truly Free" — a grotesque parody of the phrase "Work Makes You Free" ("Arbeit Macht Frei"), which was emblazoned across the gates of Auschwitz. So much for the Vatican’s highly touted campaign to apologize for past anti-Semitic behavior.

IN THIS CONTEXT, the canonization of Padre Pio, as well as the public-relations hoopla that the Vatican has attached to it, makes perfect sense. The pope’s conservative politics, his retrograde vision of the Church, and his insistence on being a top-down manager — well, let’s face it, it’s not called a hierarchy for nothing — find a perfect match in this new saint. Indeed, who better to sanctify in the midst of a worldwide crisis concerning priestly sexual abuse (of various kinds) than a priest who has been accused of such behavior and vindicated in the course of canonization? While the priest sex scandal is now in full bloom, it is important to remember that it has been in the making for at least two decades. One might imagine that "the cause" — as the Vatican puts it — of Padre Pio’s canonization would have progressed more quickly if the cases of John Geoghan or Father Porter had never reached the courtroom. Even Padre Pio’s old-fashioned, damn-near-medieval mysticism — what other saint has claimed the power of bilocation in the past two centuries? — would have been a mark against him in the more enlightened church of the 1970s. But under John Paul II, it’s seen by the Vatican as a return of traditional spiritual values — mysteries that are beyond explanation and that must be believed and accepted on faith alone. Indeed, the very acceptance of the miraculousness of Padre Pio’s stigmata can be seen as reflecting the church’s hostility to modern science, particularly its reproductive technologies and stem-cell research. Don’t forget, the Vatican’s official agreement with Galileo came less than two decades ago, and that was after a 13-year-long investigation by the Holy See.

Let’s not kid ourselves: whatever progress the United States Conference of American Bishops made in bringing the Roman Catholic Church out of the Dark Ages will face strong opposition from Rome. The Vatican may rubber-stamp the new US policy on the sexual abuse of children — though that is by no means a foregone conclusion, as a Holy See spokesman has already stated that canon law does not require the reporting of abuse by priests to law-enforcement officials. Either way, the conservative legacy of Pope John Paul II, including all those he’s marched into sainthood, will be with us for a very long time.

Michael Bronski is the author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (St. Martin’s, 1998). He can be reached at mabronski@aol.com