Dear Friends,
As for the many saints and blessed declared by St John Paul the Great - let's examine this in a different light, shall we?
The majority (90%+) of saints in the calendar are local saints.
From the beginning, the local Church in the person of the bishop declared local saints for local veneration - this is still the case throughout Orthodoxy.
In Greece, as I understand it, there are saints who are so in the opinion of a local village and perhaps in that of the next - but that is where the veneration stops. There are thousands of such, in fact.
And these local saints are known by the local people whose voice first canonized them ahead of the Church.
Rome has, since the 16th century, insisted that ONLY it has the right to beatify or canonize - even though local RC bishops in Europe have, since then, continued to beatify saints for their local dioceses and, later, Rome allowed their cult.
St John Paul the Great brought back a lot of the earlier tradition of the "local saint" by travelling throughout the world and bringing the Beatification and Canonization ceremony back to the local Church.
He was a church leader who was VERY conscious of history and traditional practice. In fact, his so-called "traditional RC" detractors, as we EC's know full well, aren't "traditional" at all - they're ecclesial memory only goes back to Trent and not sooner than the 13th century in western church history.
Moreover, Pope Benedict XVI is going even FURTHER along these lines by delegating local bishops to actually do the Beatifications! (This happened as recently as this week in Poland during a Congress where three Polish priests were beatified, one a martyr under soviet communism and the ceremony was conducted by bishops).
And when St John Paul the Great was in Ukraine five years ago, (and I don't think I've ever heard our EC stalwarts here mention this even once
), he simply was present for the declaration of the New Martyrs et al. as saints by the UGCC!
(The majority of those beatified by the late Pope were Martyrs - nothing suspect about that as the early Church often included THOUSANDS of martyrs in her calendar, just as soon as they were killed - in the Greek Church, St George of Ioannina, I believe, was slowly being tortured by his executioner as the Litia service was being conducted in the Church. A boy at the front door kept watch as the Priest read out the names of the Saints . . . as St George's head came off, the boy shouted out loud 'George is dead!' at which moment the Priest ended the Litia service with the words 'and of the Holy New Martyr George of Ioannina and all Thy Saints, Amen!'
Add to this the fact that over the years the canonization process in Rome has become rather scandalous in terms of the large sums of money required to "scientifically prove" a miracle - effectively punishing poor Catholic countries that could not raise the sums for their saintly candidates.
No, as someone who has studied hagiography for quite a few years now, I APPLAUD St John Paul the Great's iniatives in this respect - also those of Pope Benedict, his successor.
Alex