Wikipedia:WikiProject Saints/Intro
A few Wikipedians have come together to make some suggestions about how we might organize data in articles about saints. These are only suggestions, things to give you focus and to get you going, and you shouldn't feel obligated in the least to follow them. But if you don't know what to write or where to begin, following the below guidelines may be helpful. Mainly, we just want you to write articles! This WikiProject aims primarily at standardizing the articles about people venerated by some Christians as saints or the blessed and making sure that they maintain a NPOV.
In the Roman Catholic Church the term "saint" refers to both the holy men, women and angels on Earth and in Heaven—however, since the 10th century, the title "Saint" is only given to persons who have been officially recognized (canonized) by the Church. Those given the title informally, prior to the establishment of the canonization process, are generally still considered both "saints" and "Saints."
The Eastern Orthodox Churches, Assyrian Church of the East, Oriental Orthodox Churches, Anglican Communion, Anglican Continuum, and Lutheran Churches maintain liturgical calendars commemorating individuals they consider to have lived according to the will of God, although not all of them use the word "saint" so often or explicitly. The African Orthodox Church, Old Catholic Churches, Independent Catholic Churches, Continuing Anglican Churches, and other Catholic churches not in communion with Rome also have lists of saints. "Canonization" in all of these groups is far less legalistic than is the Roman Catholic. Also, in these churches, lack of "official recognition" in no way, shape, or form, prevents someone from being a full-fledged Saint. This project will include within its scope those individuals formally recognized as saints or included in the liturgical calendars of one or more Christian denominations.
The steps to canonization that the candidates have to go through to become a saint:
Saints who are also venerated by the Eastern Orthodox Church are in Category:Christian saints by century and/or Category:Christian saints by nationality.
| Catholics by stage of sainthood | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Candidates | Proclaimed | ||
| Servants of God | Venerated Catholics | Beatified people | Saints |
| by nationality | by nationality | by nationality | by nationality |
| by religious order | by religious order | by religious order | by religious order |
| proclaimed by local bishop | by pope proclaimer | by pope proclaimer | by pope proclaimer |
| popes | popes | popes | popes |
Non-Christian Saints: If there is an interest in including saints from religions other than Christianity, please propose those changes on our talk page and we can integrate them into the wikiproject.
Subpages
WikiProject Saints maintains a number of subpages in order to organize the work that is done here. Please feel free to pick out a page and help out.
- List of all subpages of this page.
- Popular pages: A bot-generated list of pageviews, useful for focused cleanup of frequently viewed articles.
- Quality operations: A bot-generated detail log for Saints articles.