More New Doctors of the Church?

St. John Paul II often lamented that “America needs more saints!” He was right of course—and he did his best to amp up the number of Saints from the Western Hemisphere—though we are still eagerly awaiting the first native-born diocesan priest Saint from the United States.

While it is often noted that St. John Paul II canonized more Saints than all of his predecessors combined in the preceding half-millennium, he also gave us just one new Doctor of the Church: the much-beloved St. Thérèse of Lisieux, “The Little Flower,” famous for her “Little Way” and extremely brief lifespan.

Doctor, of course, simply means teacher. And as noted by Bernard McGinn, in his eminently readable tome The Doctors of the Church, no less an authority than St. Thomas Aquinas (“The Angelic Doctor” aka “The Common Doctor”) “has no set terminology or standard list of teachers or doctors, because this would not fit with his fluid and analogous understanding of the term.” Thus, under Pope Francis the somewhat unknown (at least in the Latin Church) St. Gregory of Narek was suddenly a Doctor of the Church, to go along with the better-known St. Irenaeus. These came on the heels of two important European Saints named Doctors by Benedict XVI: John of Avila, the indefatigable Spanish preacher, and Hildegard of Bingen, the great mystic.

What I find most fascinating about these Doctors of the Church—which thanks to Pope Leo XIV now includes St. John Henry Newman—are the Saints who have not made the cut, at least not yet. And since they have already cleared the hurdle of “sainthood,” the relatively arbitrary bar of being named a “Doctor” should not be too difficult for any of the following:

• St. Benedict: the founder of Western Monasticism. Actually, every time his feast day rolls around, I’m amazed that he’s not already a Doctor of the Church. In addition to giving a method of the monk’s life in Western European, he literally wrote the book on monasticism, which almost every contemplative order has borrowed from.

• St. Francis of Assisi: True, his literary output does not amount to much, but as it is famously attributed to him, “Preach the Gospel at all times: use words if necessary.” The first to receive the stigmata (give or take St. Paul), he, along with the founder of the Friars Preachers, St. Dominic, not only took the Gospel call to poverty literally but also the words to “rebuild the Church, which is falling down.” His most enduring legacy? The sheer number of Friars, Conventuals, Capuchins, Third Order Regular, Poor Clares, and tertiaries, who, when combined, provide the largest religious order still at work in the Church today. I’ve always found it strange that Franciscans St. Anthony of Padua, who sat at the Holy Deacon’s feet at the last great Franciscan meeting, and St. Bonaventure, who wrote the first biography of Francis, are doctors while Francis is not.

• St. Norbert: the first Saint to truly meld the active and contemplative life into a workable model for the religious life. Also, along with St. Bernard—his friend and confidant (who is a Doctor)—he helped get both the pope and the emperor back on an even keel. In addition to giving an entirely new type of religious order to the Church (based on the Rule of St. Augustine), St. Norbert also did much to expand the Church to the East, where he was the Archbishop of Magdeburg and had a mandate from the pope to preach wherever he wanted.

• St. Bruno: About 500 years after St. Benedict, St. Bruno brought Western Monasticism back—way back—to its Eastern/Egyptian desert rigors and returned it to a life of hermits, living together in “Charterhouses.” Along with the Norbertines, his is one of the very few pre-Reformation religious orders that has not undergone some kind of breakaway or reinvention—cf. the Carmelites (O.Carm and O.C.D.) and the Benedictines, who have taken in the Camaldolese (O.S.B. Cam.), Sylvestrines, Cistercians, and Trappists. Forced to leave his beloved Grand Chartreuse by order of the pope, who wanted him close at hand as an official advisor, St. Bruno wound up having a huge influence on the Church in Rome and Calabria, as well as his foundation in France.

• St. Bridget of Sweden: one of those few mystics who bring a “you are there” sense to her writings—and by “there” I mean the Passion and death of Our Lord and Savior. While this has been granted to many great Saints—from St. Catherine of Siena (a Doctor, herself) to St. Rita of Cascia (the patron saint of the impossible, who wound up with a thorn in her forehead due to her mystical encounters)—perhaps no one has captured, in retrospect, the suffering Jesus underwent for the sake of us all and gotten it down in readable prose.

• St. Ignatius of Loyola: like St. Francis of Assisi, supra, one of those supremely-far-sighted Saints who could see what the Church needed before the Church herself could envision it. Where Francis saw a return to unmitigated poverty—both of spirit and purse—as a sort of reset for a Church that was barreling toward a split with Protestants without even knowing it, St. Ignatius, the soldier/saint/psychologist, gave the Church Militant both the “mind of Christ,” in his celebrated Spiritual Exercises, and his absolute, unquestioning obedience to the pope. The latter allowed the Church to expand through the efforts of great missionary Jesuit Saints such as St. Francis Xavier and St. Peter Canisius (another Doctor of the Church) the “second Apostle of Germany.”

• St. John Paul II: While he himself would probably be the first to debunk this idea, when one looks at the contribution JPII made not only to the papacy and the Church but to the world at large, he is, at the very least, a reasonable candidate. Since many (most?) of the Doctors of the Church are chosen due to their written output, St. John Paul II gave us not only those two monuments of post-Vatican II Catholicism The Catechism and The Code of Canon Law but his own writings—especially Love and Responsibility, The Gospel of Life, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, and, toward the end, Rise, Let Us Go and Memory and Identity, and, for extra credit: his early poems and plays. Almost unbelievably, there has not been a pope who was a Doctor of the Church since St. Gregory the Great (540-604)!

Like over-anticipating the beatification—let alone the canonization—of souls who are now in the hand of God and whose causes should never be given too many liberties, the list of “possible” Doctors represents nothing more than my own ideas, without any argument that these are possibilities.