By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza

Popes give special attention to those they canonize in Jubilee years. The joint canonization of Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis today marks a highlight of Jubilee 2025, and perhaps a high point of Leo's pontificate.

For the Jubilee 1900, Pope Leo XIII canonized two saints, both with fairly wide popular devotion, Jean-Baptiste de La Salle and Rita of Cascia. Not all canonized saints enjoy a widespread cult; most are relatively unknown. For holy years, popes try to find popular saints.

Venerable Pius XII canonized Maria Goretti in 1950, to whom devotion was so widespread that it was the first canonization held outdoors in St. Peter's Square, in order to accommodate hundreds of thousands, including the 84-year-old mother of the new saint.

In 1975, St. Paul VI canonized Elizabeth Ann Seton and Oliver Plunkett, successor to St. Patrick. Martyred in 1681, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland was an even more prominent clergyman than St. John Fisher. Plunkett's canonization completed the raising to the altars of the martyrs of the English Reformation, to whom Paul VI gave particular attention.

In 2016, during the extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, Pope Francis canonized Mother Teresa, the 20th century's exemplar of the works of mercy, as well as José Sánchez del Río, the teenage martyr of the Cristiada in Mexico. The Holy Father also canonized Elizabeth of the Trinity, the Carmelite contemporary of the Little Flower. Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote a book about Thérèse and Elizabeth, Two Sisters in the Spirit, in which he employed the marvelous image that saints are God's prime numbers.

Pope Pius XI and St. John Paul the Great most extensively decorated the jubilee calendar with prominent canonizations. It may be that 2025 will be considered similar by generations hence.

Pius XI concentrated several major ceremonies into the early summer of 1925: Thérèse of Lisieux, Peter Canisius, Jean-Marie Vianney, and John Eudes, the latter two on the same day. He also beatified the Jesuit Martyrs of North America in June and Korean martyrs in July. These were saints of great renown and thus had the happy ancillary effect of boosting pilgrim numbers in Rome for the jubilee.

John Paul prepared for the Great Jubilee over decades, already mentioning it in the initial paragraphs of his first encyclical in 1979. The program of canonizations was chosen with great care to mark the end of the totalitarian century; he canonized groups of martyrs from both Mexico and China, the latter vehemently protested by the Chinese Communist regime, even though the martyrs predated Mao's revolution. Those canonizations were meant to highlight the "new martyrs" of the murderous regimes of the concluding century.

He traveled to Fátima - his only jubilee trip outside of Biblical lands - to beatify the child visionaries, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, and to reveal the "third secret," part of the hidden history of the 20th century. At the centre of it all, he proposed the message of Divine Mercy, the "ultimate limit to evil in the world," with the canonization of Faustina Kowalska, this "daughter of Poland" who became the "first saint of the third millennium."

In addition, John Paul canonized Katharine Drexel, an American pioneer in education for racial minorities, and Josephine Bakhita, the former Sudanese slave who now enjoys remarkable prominence as a patroness against the scourge of human trafficking.

In addition to Frassati and Acutis this month, the customary October canonizations include Ignazio Choukrallah Maloyan, Peter To Rot, Vincenza Maria Poloni, Maria del Monte Carmelo Rendiles Martínez, Maria Troncatti, José Gregorio Hernández Cisneros, and Bartolo Longo. A few names stand out.

Peter To Rot, the son of early converts to Catholicism in Papua New Guinea, was a lay catechist. Catechists are key agents of evangelization and catechesis where priests are scarce. He was martyred by the occupying Japanese forces in July ...