St. Denis, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, who sometime after 250AD was martyred but not before, according to the Golden Legend, miraculously is said to have picked up his severed head and preached a sermon with it in his hands while walking seven miles from Montmartre where he had been beheaded.
The Catholic Church, of course, when it investigated the story of St. Denis wanted to make sure the distance he walked with his head in his hands was correctly asserted as about seven miles. There was some suggestion it was only six miles. Now, that’s a true Catholic debate. Also honored along with Saint Denis today are his two companions, a priest named Rusticus, and a deacon, Eleutherius, who were martyred alongside him and buried with him.
Born in Italy, much of St. Denis’ life remains shrouded in the mists of history, and nothing is definitely known of the exact time or place of his birth in Italy, or indeed, of his early life. St. Fabian, the 20th Pope, sent him with five other missionary bishops to Gaul where the Church had been persecuted under the Roman Emperor Decius.
Ascertaining the historical facts of St. Denis life hasn’t been made easier by the erroneous conflation in the Middle Ages of St. Denis of Paris with St. Dionysius the Areopagite, and with the Pseudo-Dionysius, the composer of the Areopagitic writings.
St. Denis was enrolled in the catalog of saints in 1568 by St. Pius V, performing what we might today call an “equivalent canonization,” a process established in 1632 by Pope Urban VIII. Until the formal canonization of St. Udalric, Bishop of Augsburg, by Pope John XIV in 993, sainthood was often more a matter of local rather than universal veneration within the Church. St. Walter of Pontoise, also known as St. Gaultier, was canonized by Archbishop Hugh de Boves, archbishop of Rouen, in 1153, and was the last saint in Western Europe to have been canonized by an ecclesiastical authority other than the Pope.
While the average time between the death of an eventual saint and canonization is 181 years and the Church usually uses a rigorous three-stage process where the Pope first declares the person a Servant of God; then Venerable; and then Blessed, before they are canonized as a saint. Popes, however, from time-to-time use equivalent canonization to extend to the whole Church, without carrying out the ordinary process of canonization, the veneration as a saint, the “cultus” of someone long venerated as such locally, also known as “confirmation of cultus.” There are three conditions for such a canonization: an ancient cultus, a general constant attestation by trustworthy historians to the virtues or martyrdom of the person, and an uninterrupted fame as a worker of miracles. Pope Francis enrolled Angela of Foligno and Peter Faber in 2013 in the catalog of saints through equivalent canonization, as he did earlier this year adding José de Anchieta, Marie of the Incarnation and Francis-Xavier de Montmorency-Laval.
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