You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,

an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to a little mini-series on Saints, Angels, and canonization.

My name is Taylor Kemp. I'm the director of Formed, and with me is Dr. Elizabeth Klein.

Dr. Kline, welcome back.

Thanks for having me.

Like I said, we're talking about angels and saints, and in this particular episode, we're talking about why does the church canonize certain people?

And how does that happen? So first, Dr. Klein, can you give us a recap of what does canonized mean? Yeah, so we talked

briefly in the last episode on one as a saint about kind of the broad definition and then the

particular definition of a canonized saint. So being canonized means that you're in an approved list, like the canon of

scripture, that's sort of, you're permitted to be incorporated into the public worship of the church.

Someone who's a canonized saint, the church has said it is okay to incorporate their name in the

Mass, ask for their intercession. So kind of like approved for public worship is what canonized means.

I'm going to throw out a potential non-Catholic Christian detraction. Go for it.

In this kind of idea. So if we're saying a saint is someone who is to a greater,

hopefully greater and greater degree, participating in the worship

of God. And then we're saying a canonized saint is someone that then is, so to speak,

recognized by the church. What would the response be of like, wait a second, are you worshipping?

Like, why should you go to a saint to participate in the

worship of God? Right. This is a good session. So like, why would I ever pray to a saint if I could just pray

to Jesus kind of thing? Okay. That would be a simpler way. No, this is a good question. And I'm a

convert, so I've thought about these things a lot. So I think to answer that question, try to do it quickly, you have to understand the Catholic understanding of the church, right? I think a lot of Protestants or maybe even just modern people in general tend to think of the church as like a group of people who get together and worship God. And we think about our relationship

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