Why is St. Peter a saint but his wife is not?

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pgd
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07 Mar 2011, 12:47 pm

Why is St. Peter a saint but his wife (a woman) is not? (Mark 1) Why would saint Peter be godly but his wife not? Why isn't Peter's wife buried next to him in Rome?

- Politics of religious funerals, philosophies, religions



Natty_Boh
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07 Mar 2011, 1:14 pm

Knowing something about her would help. And be nice. But we don't know anything of her; not even if she was still alive at the time of the Gospels.


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07 Mar 2011, 1:40 pm

Of Saintly memory topic

Pete may have been a widower, or separated, according to the link below.

http://www.12apostlesofthecatholicchurch.com/peter.html

If Pete had been blasphemed, would this mean his wife would be? Couples do have individual lives, you know.

And if she had become a saint, would this automatically entail Pete's beatification?

Really, pgd, you are scrapping the bottom here. :lol:


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07 Mar 2011, 1:42 pm

pgd, are you running out of ideas? Will your CPU overload when this happens, somewhat like HAL-9000 at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey?


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naturalplastic
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07 Mar 2011, 2:41 pm

There is no paucity of female saints.
It may be that the sex ratio is lobsided towards men (like both Who's Who, and America's most wanted).

Although gathering stats on this is probably hard because saints are a somewhat mirage-y population to take a census of.

But being female didnt stop Barbara, Faith, Joan, and the dozens of Theresa's, and Marys, from becoming canonized.

Further: (like Peter's wife) none of the husbands, fathers, nor brothers, of any of these ladies got canonized along with them. Or atleast not as a rule.

I could be wrong, but Im not aware of any husband-and-wife team being canonized (like a pair of matching bookends) by any Christian church as powercouple saints.

So I dont see what the issue is.

P.S.

For any ecclessiastical experts: have they canonized any saints as married couples?
Never thought about the subject before. Some husband and wife pair must have gotten burned at the stake by heathens somewhere and sometime in the last 2000 years.



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07 Mar 2011, 3:15 pm

Have any married women who were not virgins ever been promoted to Saint?



Natty_Boh
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07 Mar 2011, 4:25 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
For any ecclessiastical experts: have they canonized any saints as married couples?
Never thought about the subject before. Some husband and wife pair must have gotten burned at the stake by heathens somewhere and sometime in the last 2000 years.


[pedant]Besides Mary and Joseph, or Mary's parents, or Elizabeth and Zechariah?[/pedant] St. Therese of Liseux's parents have been beatified as of '08, and there was another couple beatified back in '01. None canonized yet, though, I believe.

As for married women named as Saints - there have been quite a few. St Monica, St Elizabeth Ann Seton, St Gianna Morelli, St Elizabeth of Hungary; to name some.


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Natty_Boh
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07 Mar 2011, 11:19 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
There is no paucity of female saints.
It may be that the sex ratio is lobsided towards men (like both Who's Who, and America's most wanted).

Although gathering stats on this is probably hard because saints are a somewhat mirage-y population to take a census of.

But being female didnt stop Barbara, Faith, Joan, and the dozens of Theresa's, and Marys, from becoming canonized.

Further: (like Peter's wife) none of the husbands, fathers, nor brothers, of any of these ladies got canonized along with them. Or atleast not as a rule.

I could be wrong, but Im not aware of any husband-and-wife team being canonized (like a pair of matching bookends) by any Christian church as powercouple saints.


Addendum: our idea of powercouples is generally along the lines of Francis and Clare, or John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila - or, quite possibly, the modern-day team of John Paul II and Mother Teresa. A man and a woman who did tremendous work together and because of each other, and who shared the same spirituality (=way of thinking), but who were not married.


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08 Mar 2011, 9:02 pm

So what does his wife have to do with anything?

If some guy gets a Nobel prize for physics should his wife get one too?
(or vice versa if it was a woman)



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08 Mar 2011, 10:59 pm

Well, it seems she ought to get something.



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08 Mar 2011, 11:58 pm

What gets someone canonized? Whats the process for canonization?



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09 Mar 2011, 12:55 am

ikorack wrote:
What gets someone canonized? Whats the process for canonization?


Well, after you are dead people pray to you. If they are cured of something than it is a "miracle"

If that happens several times then you must be a saint.



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10 Mar 2011, 4:43 pm

Husband and wife saints - Ann and Joachim are traditionally honored as Mary's parents. And there's Mary and Joseph themselves, although according to official Catholic doctrine they never had what most people would regard as a normal married sexual relationship.

There are a lot of female saints, but the vast majority of them are virgins, and the ones who aren't, are mostly widows. The Catholic rule seems to be, if you're a woman and want to be a saint, you must either never have sex, or spend long years repenting of any sex you happened to experience. More so if you were a loose woman like Mary of Egypt, but also if you were a good Christian wife like Elizabeth of Hungary. In many of the virgin saints' stories there's a nasty sort of sexual sadism involved - many of them being persecuted mostly for refusing to have sex, and lots of scope for stories and images about naked young women undergoing various colorful tortures. It's not just a medieval thing either - look up Maria Goretti, there's that same element in her story and she was only canonized in 1950.


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11 Mar 2011, 2:55 am

pgd wrote:
Why is St. Peter a saint but his wife (a woman) is not? (Mark 1) Why would saint Peter be godly but his wife not? Why isn't Peter's wife buried next to him in Rome?

- Politics of religious funerals, philosophies, religions


Saints are made by men of the Church, not God. Could it be that the men of the Church are anti-woman bigots?

ruveyn



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11 Mar 2011, 9:20 am

ThatRedHairedGrrl wrote:
look up Maria Goretti, .


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Goretti

Quote:
Some members of the feminist movement have criticized the veneration of Maria Goretti and other "martyrs of chastity", on the grounds that the Church reinforces misogyny, sexism, and physical/psychological violence against women by supporting the "better dead than raped" adage. According to some feminists, this phenomenon as a whole shows how rape is both "eroticized and normalized in patriarchy."[20][21]

This controversy was also explored by a 200-page book published in 1985, Poor Saint, Poor Assassin, by Giordano Bruno Guerri.[22] Guerri, an Italian historian, took the position that Pope Pius XII let the urgency of his desire to present a contradiction to post-WW II American standards of sexual liberty overcome the usual standard of slow, meticulous investigation.[3][4] Noel Corsz, a photojournalist who met with Goretti's family members and her killer in 1952 wrote about the case in 2002, reviewing a public debate Guerri had on February 11, 1985:

Guerri argued that "irrespective of whatever happened, it was not worthwhile for Maria Goretti to let herself be killed for a stupid insignificant value such as virginity, and that the Church had done even worse by projecting her as an example." At the time of this debate in 1985 in Milan, the historian Luigi Firpo asked Guerri in a public hall: "An example of what?" The reply came: "A negative example to mislead other young girls to prefer death."[4]
A second dispute among the sources is Benito Mussolini's involvement in Goretti's canonization. Corsz presents Mussolini's desire as further proof of the undeniability of Goretti's holiness, and of her good effects on the living: "Even Mussolini wanted her canonised."[4] Corsz also presents historian Giordano Bruno Guerri's more cynical take on Mussolini's motives:

Of course Guerri asserted that the idea that beatification came as an antidote to the widespread immorality of the times, and that it was only in 1935 in the Concordat Vatican fever that the canonisation process began. The dictator Mussolini had reclaimed the Pontine marshes and felt that the farmers and peasants who came from the Paduan flatlands deserved a saint....


There seem to be quite a lot of politics involved in deciding who gets to be a saint.



ThatRedHairedGrrl
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11 Mar 2011, 3:48 pm

@pandabear: Absolutely.

In her book about the Virgin Mary, Marina Warner mentions that, I think it was either her or a friend, who had the nuns at school play the class of girls a taped dramatisation of the Maria Goretti story, complete with heavy breathing from the rapist and screams from the victim. And they call pagans weird?


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