Church in Spain has 349 open causes for canonization involving more than 3,000 candidates

The Church in Spain has 349 causes for canonization, 42 of which are currently in the diocesan phase. In total, there are 3,344 candidates for sainthood, according to data released July 1 by the Spanish Bishops’ Conference.

Late last month, Lourdes Grosso, director of the conference’s Office for the Causes of Saints, and Father Fernando del Moral, its deputy director, presented a report on the Spanish causes that are underway for heroic virtue to Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.

The report complements the one presented in 2024 regarding causes based on martyrdom during the religious persecution in 20th-century Spain, both before and during the 1936–1939 civil war. The martyrdom causes are almost always group causes: One diocese or religious order bundles all its members killed in the same persecution episode into a single joint case rather than filing separate causes for each martyr.

Together, these reports made it possible to compile material that had previously been scattered, following a three-year process of research and inter-diocesan collaboration in which documentation from the dicastery was cross-referenced with…