Why American Saints and Causes: The Case from Data
In addition to the positive value of the witness of lives devoted to Christ, American Saints and Causes exists because we believe that the causes from the United States suffer from a lack of advocacy. We aim to help change that. One might ask what evidence suggests that American causes don't get the focus that they should. Fair question. To be clear, we do not have any insight into how the Dicastery does its work, nor think it appropriate to speculate about motivations. Further, this post isn't meant to suggest that saints from other countries are not a great gift and help to the whole Church. But some of the data is hard to look at and not conclude that the Church's process has, for whatever reason, a bias towards Italian causes.
Compare Italy and the United States. Italy's total current population is estimated to be about 58M, with about 74% (or ~42M) being Catholic.1 The United States' Catholic population is estimated to be ~71M (approximately 21% of ~335M people).2 3 The United States and Italy have the 4th and 5th largest Catholic populations in the world, respectively.4 Seeing this information, one might reasonably expect to see decrees of Venerable, Blessed or Saint to be issued by the Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints at similar rates for individuals associated with the United States and those associated with Italy. The data, however, paints a very different picture.
We examined every decree issued by the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints from January 2013 through July 2024. Treating an individual as associated with a country if they were born or died in that country, we tabulated how many causes associated with the United States and Italy advanced towards canonization during that window and calculated various statistics. Some of the individuals for the United States, by this method, also were associated with Italy, so they were counted for both countries. We counted recognition of martyr groups as a single decree, so to that extent, the number of individuals may be different depending on where any "companions" were associated with the lead martyr that was recognized. The results are striking and summarized in the table below:
In sum, during the same time period, the United States only had 6.07% of the number of decrees that Italy received, despite the United States having a 22% larger Catholic population.
To be clear, we can only draw limited conclusions from this study. For example, data on the total number of causes under consideration is difficult to come by. It would be interesting to know how the same statistics, calculated as percentages of the active causes for a country, would compare with the findings in the table above. And we can provide no insight into why the disparity exists, which could have a host of explanations theoretically, from the timing of the causes (e.g., are causes from the United States generally more recent starts), funding differences for those supporting causes (e.g., Italy is home to the heads of many religious orders), to just general proximity leading to greater familiarity with Italian cases. Nonetheless, the disparity is so stark it at least suggests greater examination would be worthwhile and efforts to bring greater attention to the causes of the United States are justified.