Michael W. Higgins, Toronto

In a matter of a fortnight—Sept. 7 and 21, respectively—two canonizations occurred: one in Rome at the Vatican, and the other in Glendale, Arizona. One was conventional, following established practice dating back centuries; the other was unconventional and of recent genesis. One was sacred, and the other para-sacred. And these canonizations—the culmination of the process of sainting—were presided over by the two most powerful Americans in the world: President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV.

When Pope Leo canonized Pier Giorgio Frassati, a young man who opposed fascism in his native Italy, he was bringing to completion a cause for sainting that was introduced in 1932. When Mr. Trump presided over the memorial service of Charlie Kirk, a tireless apologist for the Make America Great Again enterprise, he was beginning a process of political elevation, placing the assassinated Mr. Kirk in the firmament of MAGA worthies.

To be sure, these saint-making efforts are not the same. Frassati’s cause was rigorous, subject to various levels of scrutiny; it was at one point suspended by one pontiff and then reactivated by another, required at least one miracle certified as a medical cure by the Vatican’s consulta medica, and was subject to papal fiat.

Mr. Kirk’s was instantaneous, overtly partisan, calibrated for maximum ideological effectiveness, and endorsed by a cabinet of like minds subject to presidential fiat.

But there are parallels that can be found in the very nature of the sainting idea.

In Fifth Business, the first novel of his Deptford trilogy, Canadian novelist Robertson Davies’s crusty, idiosyncratic, immeasurably wise protagonist Dunstable Ramsay observes: “I have always found it revealing to see who gets to be saint in any period…[for] there is more to the making of a saint than the innocently devout might think likely.”

Undoubtedly, the politics of saint-making has been and remains a defining feature of the process. And when the cause of the slain archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, was introduced in 1997, and when, in spite of decades of opposition, it successfully concluded with his canonization in 2018, church politics played a major part. He was sainted as a martyr.

U.S. Vice-President J. D. Vance invoked this category when he spoke of Mr. Kirk as a “martyr for the Christian faith.” This is problematic on several grounds: in the Catholic tradition (with which Mr. Vance identifies), martyrdom must be established by a death that comes as a consequence of odium fidei, or hatred of the faith. That was certainly the case for Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko, for instance, now beatified as a martyr because he perished at the hands of government thugs in the Polish government opposed to Solidarity.

But Mr. Vance’s argument that Mr. Kirk was slain because of hatred of the faith is a mighty stretch. The alleged assassin’s apparent motives are a vipers’ nest of deranged obsessions, conspiracy theories, and perversely constructed memes drawn from dark sources—but they do not constitute hatred of the Christian faith. Unless, of course, you identify MAGA’s Christo-nationalist credo with Christianity itself, as it appears one senior American prelate feels comfortable in doing. Timothy Dolan, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, remarked on Fox and Friends that Mr. Kirk “is a modern St. Paul…one I think who knows what Jesus meant when he said the truth will set you free.”

This is not at all astonishing when you consider Cardinal Dolan’s record of fellow feeling for Mr. Trump’s politics (the cardinal was a prominent presence during Mr. Trump’s inauguration) and his reputation for antagonism toward Pope Francis during his lifetime. But it is astonishing that he would provide so public a commendation in the early days of the Leonine pontificate, when the American pope is trying to navigate the treacherous political and ecclesial waters of his home country.

Mr. Kirk’s platform of beliefs has always struck me as a mélange of arcane and romantic perspectives, homespun notions and odious convictions. But his efforts to engage with sometimes hostile interlocutors appeared sincere, and his murder diminishes further the paltry few remaining initiatives in the U.S. to shrink the chasm of polarity. In this, he was heroic.

It is not a sacrilegious simulacrum to see Mr. Kirk’s “raising to the altars” as a parallel undertaking to the Roman Catholic cult of the saints, but confounding the two involves a dangerous alchemy.
When a political ideology enjoys the sanction of the church—any church—it is the Gospel that is sundered. Real martyrs know that.