Readers of this column should by now have an idea of what I should honestly call the dramatis persona from whose script I am reading: the Devil’s Advocate, a historical function required for every canonization process submitted to the Vatican. Like every other professional role, it depends for its prosperity on the existence of a marketplace.

The job entails finding weaknesses and identifying serious reasons that could serve to invalidate a dossier for the canonization of a candidate for sainthood. Every generation has produced at least a few human beings who during the span of their lifetime demonstrated manifestly virtuous behavior reflecting what Catholic doctrine refers to as a “state of grace.” The numbers of candidates vary from generation to  generation, producing what some might call marketplace variations. The simple truth is that the Devil’s Advocate can find gainful work only if there is a steady supply of potential saints.

A quick glance at statistics might convince you that this should be a good moment in history for the Devil’s Advocate. Pope Francis, who died last year, canonized 942 saints, breaking all previous records. Until the reign of John Paul II in 1978, the modern church — since the creation of the office of Devil’s Advocate in 1583 — had only canonized 300 new saints. But the figures are deceptive. Not only because Francis canonized those known as the 813 Martyrs of Otranto as a single group. Far more significant, from my  humble point of view, is the fact that in 1983 my office was abolished. Pope John Paul II overhauled the canonization laws (the Codex Juris Canonici), removing the “Devil’s Advocate” role to make the process faster and less expensive.

In other words, well before AI became poised to wipe out most jobs connected with administrative and legal matters, the first Polish pope, undoubtedly schooled by his firsthand experience of the inefficiency of Soviet bureaucracy, chose to apply modern Western managerial streamlining practices, accelerating outcomes and improving productivity. Those like myself who claim (symbolically) to inherit the function are condemned to rely on literary fiction to keep the office present in the public’s mind.

I do so for a reason. Despite the increase in the numbers of recently canonized saints (see the table below), very few people these days are even vaguely aware of the identities of the latest successful candidates. Even fewer have any sense of the inspiring stories their saintly lives represent. In the not-so-distant past, Catholic households possessed a book called, The Lives of the Saints. It reminded generation after generation of a diversity of examples of moral and spiritual heroism that might at some point influence their behavior.

The real reasons sanctity has disappeared from our media landscape

It may be a coincidence, but at least since the moment John Paul II abolished the office of Devil’s Advocate, our society has tended to focus on other virtues than the ones we associate with traditional sainthood. Humility, for example, went out of fashion long ago, as did patience. That change of moral focus happened when an entire culture, reflecting on theoretical physicist Albert Einstein’s fourth dimension, decided on the metaphysical principle that “time is money.” This bold equation led to other interesting equivalences such as “money is speech” and “corporations are people” (the updated basis for understanding what the expression “We the people” means in the preamble to the United States Constitution).

Given such an obvious and brazen shift in the scale of values, I needn’t even comment on the standard expectation that saints would see the love of lucre as a path to be avoided, preferring poverty to wealth. Today’s culture has taught us to consider the poor as unworthy of respect, as the sign that they lack moral fiber. Anyone who fails to focus on becoming wealthy today risks being labeled a “loser.” 

If you are not rich to begin with by choosing the right parents, enterprising Americans understand that their aim in life should be to create a brand, to be an influencer in their community or, even better, in the media. Everyone’s aim is to command the attention of those who have money to spend on them, whether it’s their employer who perceives them as contributing to the organization’s profitability or the public of a social media channel they manage to set up to sell their podcast. Being devoid not only of ambition but especially a visible dedication to the pursuit of wealth has come to be classified as a cardinal sin, a sign of moral weakness.

With such a set of values, how likely is it that today’s media and its audiences might even be curious about sainthood? Who today even retains a modicum of respect for what was traditionally understood to be saintly behavior? 

To illustrate what has changed in the public’s notion of what constitutes even purely secular sainthood, Hollywood provides some crucial evidence. The mythology surrounding newly-elected Congressman Jefferson Smith, the hero of Frank Capra’s movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, had by the end of the  20th century faded into the mists of history. Until the new millennium, Americans tended to see Capra’s “innocent everyman” as an ideal, an implicit model for all politicians in working inside the nation’s democratic institutions. Smith stands as a kind of modern American St. George who appears to slay the dragon of endemic corruption. Capra’s film stages a struggle between a nefarious, invisible political machine and a disorganized but virtuous populace, who in its democratic humility would have no voice were it not for saintly figures such as Mr. Smith.

Hollywood’s entertainment industry brought the 20th century to an end with one last but subtly transformed glance at the morality promoted by Capra’s Mr. Smith. The television series, West Wing, ran from 1999 to 2006. Actor Aaron Sorkin’s rapid-fire “walk-and-talk” dialogue contained a heavy dose of Capra-like idealism intended to offer Americans the hope of something that might surpass the deteriorating image of Washington, DC, politics provoked by US President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal, followed by the insensitive militaristic cynicism of the George W. Bush–Dick Cheney administration. West Wing prolonged the ideal of a politician responsive to the real needs of the nation.

In 2013, seven years after West Wing’s final episode aired, a new series, House of Cards, offered a revised vision of Washington politics. Anti-hero Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey — who, much like playwright William Shakespeare’s Richard III, shared his devious thoughts with the audience through the series’ innovative use of “the fourth wall” — allowed the audience to discover a more realistic perception of political reality upending Capra’s and Sorkin’s established mythology. Smith looks at the Lincoln Memorial and finds inspiration; Underwood looks at it and sees a man who was smart enough to get a statue.

Can US presidents be saints?

That shift in moral bearings is not the only thing that has changed. It’s been accompanied by a serious life-style change. Just think about the profiles of recent US presidents, all men who purported to be dedicated to the notion of public service. The certified narcissist Donald Trump may be an extreme example, but he only deviates from the pattern in the intensity of his egoism. Democrats Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all came from modest backgrounds and referred to those modest origins to get elected. They all subsequently found clever ways to join the social stratum of the super-rich in their status, personal image and lifestyle. Republicans Bush (H.W. and W.) and Trump, conversely, were born into it and like skilled surfers simply rolled with the waves.

In contrast, US Presidents Harry Truman (1945–1953) and Dwight Eisenhower (1953–1961), a former general, retired to their modest homes and generally avoided any obvious form of media attention. While they never sought total seclusion, they deliberately avoided the worlds of Wall Street and Hollywood in an effort to preserve the dignity of the office. Truman returned to his modest family home in Independence, Missouri, far from anyone’s limelight. Eisenhower retired to a working farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Neither of them sought to “cash in.” Both viewed themselves as servants of the nation, not consultants for hire.

While Bush, having retired to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, could be seen as manifesting a throwback to the Capraesque pattern exemplified by Truman and Eisenhower, most Americans perceived his relative self-effacement as a reflection of the man’s severely limited capacity for serious analysis and compelling discourse. No one doubted that the Texas cowboy — who achieved electoral success as a “compassionate conservative” and man of the people, claiming to be allergic to nation-building — had the inflated ego and overweening ambition required to get elected. Moreover, he demonstrated his underlying, un-Capraesque cynicism once in office through his ill-thought-out and ineptly executed foreign policy, conducted at the service of the very military-industrial complex Eisenhower famously denounced days before leaving the White House.

In summary, in my (imagined) role as Devil’s Advocate, I have for some time noted with amusement the desire that has been instilled at the core of the secular US republic to seek the equivalent of sainthood among political figures, real or fictional. Hollywood didn’t create it, but transformed it into an artform. Actors in general performed more credibly than real politicians. But there was one potential exception: US President John F. Kennedy managed to partially achieve the status, but at the price of martyrdom. It seems that James Angleton’s CIA rather than Hollywood played the principal role in producing that unforgettable tragedy.

Serious candidates today see no value in cultivating Smith’s style of sanctity that would require them to stand up exclusively for the people’s interests. The American public appears to have given up searching for new Mr. Smiths. Instead, they understand, perhaps with some regret, that Underwood is closer to the now standardized model. Some observers might object that Democrat Bernie Sanders’s campaigns in 2016 and 2020 prove Capra’s mythology may still be alive in the world of actual politics. But the ease with which Bernie was marginalized by his own party helps to explain why a faux populist like Trump, totally dedicated to his own ego and indifferent to anything else (besides money), could be elected not once (an acceptable fluke) but twice… and three times by his own reckoning!

So, in my assumed role as Devil’s Advocate, I must draw a regretful conclusion: There is no returning to the past. It’s been clear for some time that no one today, and certainly not the media, is interested in the modern Catholic saints, who in any case no longer have to face the scrutiny of the official Devil’s Advocate. But the prospects are no better for any potential secular saints who may be seeking to climb the ranks in our political class. The hope Capra created and Sorkin prolonged, that we might one day be governed by such secular saints, has clearly disappeared from everyone’s radar.

Does that mean there are no candidates left, even outside politics? In my next column, I’ll propose a surprising one… before going on to uncover its seriously disqualifying weaknesses.

*[The Devil’s Advocatepursues the tradition Fair Observer began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more ofthe Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.