Waiting for a Miracle

The men, and they are almost all men, are bundled up against the cold. Winter in Wellington can be brutal, and this morning is no exception: grey and drizzling with rain. At the Suzanne Aubert Compassion Centre & Soup Kitchen on Tory Street, staff and volunteers are busy preparing breakfast. For the homeless, sleeping out would have been miserable. “It’s cold as Judith Collins’ heart out there,” one of the men quips. But the soup — carrot and coconut cream — is hot and the atmosphere is warm and collegial. Each table is decorated with a vase of flowers, gathered weekly by the same two volunteers, a woman in her 80s and her daughter. From the kitchen, you can hear someone playing piano: “Fur Elise” and then, appropriately, “When the Saints Go Marching In”. She isn’t one yet, but the late Suzanne Aubert, a diminutive Frenchwoman who founded the kitchen in 1901, is on track to become our first Catholic saint. For the 450,000-odd Catholics in New Zealand, this is a very, very big deal.

For the faithful, a saint is someone who personifies Christian values. In old oil paintings, they’re the bearded men and beatific women looking down at you with loving eyes. Because it’s such a high honour, church authorities in Rome are extremely judicious with their selections: potential saints need to have either died for the faith as martyrs or lived lives of exemplary virtue; in most cases, their supporters also need to provide proof of at least two posthumous miracles. Aubert has been dead for 95 years and the case for her canonisation, being advanced by local supporters, is still grinding its way through the arcane process, a multi-step marathon that can take centuries. (An analysis by Pew Research Centre put the average time between death and canonisation at 181 years since 1588.) Historically, people and local authorities created their own saints on the basis of popular demand, resulting in dubious outcomes such