Among the areas the Pope is tackling are the Catholic Church’s saint-making practices

Earlier this week I took a trip to Durham Cathedral and the tomb of St Cuthbert, a great saint of the north east, and a much-loved man who was variously a hermit, monk and bishop. His simple tomb, illuminated by a few flickering candles, seemed a world away from the hoo-ha in Rome over publication of a book by investigative journalist Gabriele Nuzzi which details yet more financial scandals in the Vatican.

You might have heard on this programme yesterday about the efforts of Pope Francis to clean up the financial mismanagement of the Vatican and about Nuzzi’s revelations of certain people resisting any change.

Among the areas the Pope is tackling are the Catholic Church’s saint-making practices. While the Church on the one hand has been diligent in recent years about who it canonizes, this has led to large fees allegedly being paid to expert witnesses during pre-canonisation enquiries. Even more disturbing are Nuzzi’s claims of huge sums being spent on gifts for prelates attending canonisations in Rome, and the lack of a proper accounting paper trail.

The simplest option might be to pull the plug on the whole saint-making business. After all, being a saint doesn’t depend on canonisation – that’s just the formal recognition of someone who has led as good a life as possible, despite all their faults and foibles. But what official recognition does do is satisfy people’s need for heroes, for people we can look up to, as examples of those who loved God and others. They encourage people when they struggle to believe and are signposts on the journey of discipleship. The saints might include the great founders of orders of friars, like Dominic and Francis, but they are also ordinary people like the Italian doctor and mother Gianna Beretta Molla, or someone like Maximilian Kolbe who readily gave up his life in Auschwitz so that someone else might live.

Making saints might be a multi-million pound business but it needn’t be. Men and women like Cuthbert used to become saints by public acclamation, honoured by those who treasured their example. That might be a way forward if Pope Francis struggles with his clean-up in Rome. Here in Britain we might acclaim Margaret Sinclair. The daughter of an Edinburgh dustman, she left school at 14, worked as a French polisher and was a trade union activist before joining a convent in London’s Notting Hill and dying of tuberculosis at the age of 25. There is no grandeur about her, just a very ordinary life extraordinarily well-lived – an ideal hero for our times.