3 Answers

  1. In Christianity, there are two concepts of holiness: spiritual and formal-legal.

    Formally, the legal characterizes not the dignity of the person himself, but the position that he occupies, the service to which he is appointed.

    Thus, the title “His Holiness Patriarch” does not mean that each particular bearer of it will be glorified later in the saints, will be included in the Holy Calendar for the height of his personal spiritual life and personal holiness. It only means that the position of Patriarch is by its very nature devoted to the service of God (holy) and requires a special dedication of one's time and effort (hence the superlative degree of comparison).

  2. If by the appointment of saints you meant canonization, glorification, then this is the same as issuing a birth certificate. A child is not born because he was given a certificate. The legal act simply states the fact of birth. Similarly, the Church simply states that someone has become a saint.

  3. You misunderstand canonization. Canonization, at least in Orthodoxy , is simply a recognition of the fait accompli of sanctity. The church doesn't make you holy, God makes you holy. Can there be erroneous” local ” canonizations? They don't know, maybe they can be. But there will be no sin in praying to such a saint. People are not infallible. However, such “infallibility” will mainly concern those about whom incorrect information was provided (in the sense of the fact of existence). We are not talking about the fact that some terrible sinner was suddenly recognized as a saint. That is, my position is that the Church does not make mistakes at Councils (it cannot recognize white as black, and black as white in matters of faith), but people in it are not infallible). In addition, in Orthodoxy there is canonization “in different ranks”. A saint is not someone who has been blameless from childhood to old age. Such are some of the righteous. There aren't many of them. Many saints-martyrs or confessors-had sinned or made mistakes in their lives before their heroic deeds. Some even made the sign of the cross just before the execution. We just don't have enough people explaining it, hence the idea of a “legal purpose”.

    And finally, the main thing. God is called a saint in the Bible. First of all, a Saint is a property of God. Any saint with a small letter is even further from Holiness with a large letter than you and I are from holiness with a small one. Therefore, if we talk about the theological, strict sense of the concept of “saint”, then only God is called Holy. Let's put this as a metaphor. Here is the Sun. It is the source of light. There is the Moon-it shines on the Earth with reflected light and there is the Earth. If you look from the ground, we are the earth, ordinary people, the Moon is the saints, and the Sun is God. Do you understand? God has holiness in his nature, the saints have revealed a small piece of this nature in themselves, and you and I have revealed even less.

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