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Catholic group pushes expedited sainthood for 6 African-Americans
BALTIMORE The process of recognizing saints in Catholicism is so arduous that it can take generations, even centuries, to complete, but even the usually slow-moving Catholic church can accelerate matters when it wants to. In the cases of Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Pope John Paul II, for example, church officials waived a five-year waiting period after their deaths to get the process started. Now a group of Baltimore Catholics says it’s time to expedite the cases of six other heroes of the faith. Parishioners of St. Ann’s Catholic Church, a predominantly African-American congregation in the East Baltimore Midway neighborhood, and the two other churches in its pastorate, Historic St. Francis Xavier and St. Wenceslaus, seek to make the case that the church should immediately canonize six Black American Catholics. The candidates include Mother Mary Lange, a Baltimore nun who started and ran a school for Black children during the era of slavery.
