HARRY Potter's close friend, Hermione Granger, may have been throttled by a plant, hassled by a werewolf and left dateless at a Hogwarts house party, but that's small beans compared to the many horrors endured by Saint Hermione of Ephesus.Persecuted as a sorceress for her healing powers during the first century AD, St Hermione was beaten across the face for hours at a time, imprisoned for years, had nails driven into her feet and was later cooked in a pot, all the while joyfully singing praise to Jesus.
Two Roman Emperors in succession tried to break her and failed; she was eventually beheaded.
''She stood up for what she believed in, even when she was put in a cauldron with hot ashes and the stuff they put on roads,'' says Kaitlin Barr, 12, a student at St Joseph's School in Hawthorn.
Along with her year 6 classmates, Kaitlin was required to research a saint and then adopt the saint's name as part of confirmation in the Catholic Church.
She found St Hermione on the internet. ''St Hermione helped people, and I'd like to help people. I want to grow up and be a vet,'' she says.
What does being a saint mean? ''I think it's someone who has done something good, and they have become like God … and you pray to them when you have different problems.''
Why not just pray to God? ''Because saints are like specialists, while God does everything … And you connect with saints more because you know more about them, while God you don't know much about. There isn't a lot written about who He or She is.''
Says Christian O'Nians, 11, of his relationship with St Ignatius of Loyola, a Spanish knight who converted after being injured in a battle: ''I feel I can pray to my saint because I know about him. Knowing what he did makes it more personal.''
The Sunday Age met with half a dozen St Joseph's pupils as part of an investigation into sainthood, particularly in the Catholic tradition, ahead of Mary MacKillop's canonisation next week in Rome.
While we spoke to scholars and priests about the political economy of sainthood, how saints are canonised with great ceremony to firm up the authority of Rome over its far-flung spiritual colonies, we also heard how the recognition of a saint begins at a grass-roots level, where an emotional and spiritual weight finds purchase in the local imagination long before the Vatican gets involved.
''The church on high just doesn't declare people saints,'' says Father Brendan Byrne, professor of New Testament at Melbourne's Jesuit Theological College.
The process begins, he says, when a large body of people have venerated - or prayed to and carried out sacred rituals in the name of - ''a holy person who has died''. The church's role, says Byrne, is to examine the evidence that this reverence is worthy of official recognition.
Typically, this veneration will begin at the saint's deathbed. Such was the case with Mary MacKillop in August 1909, when she was visited by Cardinal Moran, who has since been endlessly quoted as saying: ''I consider I have this day assisted at the deathbed of a saint.''
When MacKillop died a few days later, people began arriving to pay homage.
''They wanted to touch her with their rosaries … they recognised in her somebody who was virtuous,'' says Professor Anne Hunt, executive dean of theology and philosophy at the Australian Catholic University.
According to the official Mary MacKillop website, mourners souvenired samples of earth from her grave and people began praying to her. From there, says Hunt, a mood in the community blossomed into a heartfelt movement.
Heartfelt because saints are personal.
They speak to a desire that finds expression in many religions and cultures: for a tangible link to the divine, a human flowering of godliness.
In recent weeks, the children of St Joseph's School went searching for this link on the internet, and seem pretty pleased with the results. But they recognise, too, what a powerful thing it is to find a saint in their own backyard.
Says Kaitlin Barr: ''It's easier for me to relate to Mary MacKillop because she's an Australian. If she was a Third World saint, it might be interesting but it would be hard for me to imagine where she's from.''
For Alex Patterson, 12, Mary MacKillop's life story may not be as dramatic as that of her own personal saint (the Martyr Sophia, who saw her three children tortured and beheaded and then cried over their bodies for three days before she, too, went to God), but they share in common a devotion to children.
''Which is important to me,'' says Alex. And it's easier to imagine Mary's life because she was born in Melbourne.''
Christian O'Nians agrees. ''I'll feel comfortable praying to Mary MacKillop for three reasons. She was alive in recent times, she was Australian and because her canonisation is on my birthday.'' He turns 12 this Sunday.
Brandon Walker, 17, is a student of Assumption College in Kilmore. On Thursday, he flies to Rome as his school's representative at the canonisation. ''Apparently, we've been given priority seating … it's a big deal,'' he says.
Brandon has family in the priesthood, and was aware of Mary MacKillop's story from when he was a boy. Saints, he says, ''give us an example of real people who are able to fulfil what God wants of us''.
Of late, he's been fostering a prayer relationship with Mary MacKillop.
''She's someone I will turn to if I'm going through tough times. When she felt nearest to God was when she embraced the hard times, knowing that God would provide. … And the fact that she's an Aussie, of course that means something. Definitely.''
Father Des Dwyer, as the parish priest, led the St Joseph's School students through their confirmation preparation.
''The saints are a great means of shaping imagination and serving as valuable heroes. And you can see these children responding to that idea. Instead of looking to the glitterati and Hollywood, they are able to respond to people who have lived heroic lives. Mary MacKillop's response to the deprived circumstances of rural Australia and young people follows that path of heroic virtue. Doing the right thing.''
Father Michael Casey, who serves as priest to two Brunswick churches, agrees that saints serve as heroes who ''inspire us as to what life is really about''.
But he also feels that saints bridge the gap between people and God. ''God remains so distant, an entity of such overwhelming scale, he's a challenge to the imagination,'' he says. ''Saints serve perhaps as a tangible link to the big mystery.''
The biggest mystery, for non-believers anyway, is the mystical aspect of saints, especially the questions of miracles and intercessions (asking a saint to get in God's ear on your behalf).
In the early days of the church, the first saints were the holy martyrs, such as Hermione and Sophia; elevated because they'd died horribly but heroically clinging to their faith. There was no requirement that they'd performed miracles in order to be canonised.
Martyrdom remains a direct ticket to sainthood. (Last week it was reported that such an application will be made on behalf of Sister Irene McCormack, an Australian nun murdered in 1991 in Peru by Shining Path guerillas.)
It's thought that the first formal canonical (or saint-making) process was established in Rome about 900 years ago, requiring the performing and verification of miracles. There was no set number of miracles and the rules were complex to the point of being arbitrary.
It was under John Paul II that the process was relatively streamlined, such that only two miracles were required.
The first leads to the candidate being beatified, which means they have been accepted as a saint in their part of the world.
Mary MacKillop was beatified in 1995 on the basis of a miracle she is said to have performed in 1961, the details of which have never been revealed.
The second miracle leads to canonisation, which means they have been accepted as a saint in the Mother Church.
MacKillop's miracle was intervening on behalf of Sydney grandmother Kathleen Evans in the 1990s, when Evans had been told she had a month to live because of inoperable brain and lung cancer.
This miracle was verified last year.
Last week, a third miracle, accepted by the Vatican, was reported on the front page of The Age: Mary MacKillop appeared in the home of a dying Woodend teenager in 2000 and helped his mother get the boy into his bed.
From that point, Jack Simpson, now 19, began a slow but sure recovery from cancer and multiple sclerosis, baffling doctors at the Royal Children's Hospital.
The theologians and priests The Sunday Age spoke to - and perhaps this is a characteristically Australian response - downplayed the miraculous side to saints.
Casey says he prefers to see saints more as inspirational figures than entities that lobby God for divine intervention. Dwyer says he'd be happier if the requirement for miracles was dropped.
''It's more about the community recognising these extraordinary, wonderful lives these people have lived,'' Dwyer says.
Byrne says he doesn't know where the miracles criteria comes from and that many people he associates with, namely, scholarly Jesuits, ''would want to play it down''.
Australians aren't ''heavily into miracles in the way Mediterraneans are'', he says. He also considers it an ''awful idea'' that the role of saints is to ''persuade miracles from a God who is reluctant to help us''.
Hunt says people get ''very confused'' about saints and miracles.
''They're not magicians … it's God who performs the miracle. Miracles are part of the process of discerning a saint.''
In other words, they're God's signal that the purported holy person is the real thing. ''It's important we don't get that out of perspective.''
While this may seem curiously dismissive of the marvellous and extraordinary … well, perhaps that's the point. If we were to see saints as unearthly magic-makers, we'd lose the gift of their human example.
''The primary thing is them being a model of heroic virtue,'' Hunt says. ''The message is we're all invited to have that deep relationship.'' She says she loves the saints. ''The world is more than the reality I see in front of me.''
Deakin University anthropologist Rohan Bastin is surprised to hear that miracles are being played down by Catholic priests and scholars, in part because they are fundamental to how saints are canonised. ''If we rule them [miracles] out, we go back to naming saints as soon as they're dead,'' he says.
He also finds it curious because saints have played a powerful role in consolidating the Catholic empire in countries where it has come under sustained pressure from other religions.
Bastin has researched the part saints played in the resilience of Catholicism as the prevailing Christian religion in Sri Lanka, despite 150 years of pressure from the Dutch Reformed Church - and a further 150 years from the Anglicans.
''You look at the nature of their worshipping practices in Sri Lanka and they are heavily into saints … and very much tied to miracles,'' says Bastin. At one church in Colombo, St Anthony's, not only Catholics come seeking mystical intervention, but also Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims.
As for the nature of miracles, Bastin says: ''Science will never be able to cope with the uniqueness of singular events. It's good with repetition. There's always something that's going to elude science … and that's the space of the miracle.''
Aside from propping up colonial outposts, Bastin says saints have proved to be powerful political tools. He gives the example of Pope John Paul II's beatification of the 13th century Hungarian-Polish queen Jadwiga as the patron saint of queens and of United Europe in the late 1980s, before the fall of communism.
''He did it right in the communist heartland. It was a very political thing to do. He was very active in using saints to affirm the Catholic empire.''
And John Paul II certainly gave the thumbs up to a lot of new saints, overseeing 1340 beatifications and 482 canonisations, more than all his modern predecessors combined.
On the blogosphere, there's much cynical grumbling that the circus of sainthood was all part of a cover-up for the emerging child sexual abuse scandal that has largely hit its stride since Pope Benedict succeeded John Paul.
The reality is, John Paul's enthusiasm was in part tied to the fact that he became pope in 1978, when the Western world was settling into a new paradigm of sexual and social liberalism, and the standing of religious heroes was well on the wane - and the repressive hand of the Soviet Union was showing no sign of weakening.
It's also worth remembering he was Polish, a people that has long held a feverish belief in the value of heroism. Within his generation were the men who charged the German tanks on horseback.
Byrne dismisses claims that the late pope's pace of saint-making (which Pope Benedict has only slightly slackened) was a means by which Rome hoped to generate good-news stories to offset the bad.
''He set about canonising people long before these scandals blew up … I don't think there is a connection. I think he wanted to make sure that each country had their own saint.''
Professor Greg Barton, of Monash University's School of Political and Social Inquiry, sees the sharp increase in canonisation under John Paul II as the intensifying of a long-standing strategy to keep local communities onside.
''If you go to South America or Africa and canonise a local hero, someone who is respected, that gives them recognition that the person they value is also valued by the church hierarchy … and the affection for that hero is also directed towards the church,'' says Barton. ''It's an efficient way of doing that, it makes perfect sense.''
The elevation of the local hero to sainthood, says Barton, provides a mediator to God who is tangible, experiential and immediate.
''There is a strong human desire for a faith that is more immediate. It's one thing to be told that Jesus is the mediator, it's another to go to the tomb of your local saint and pray for their intervention in your life.''
While there are plenty on the blogosphere who see Rome's machinations as sinister, Barton isn't so jaded. ''Just because we can see an explanatory mechanism, the political economy of sainthood, it doesn't automatically devalue the result. Human goodness, in itself, is valuable. The example of someone in the community who makes us want to lift our game … this is a laudable human response.''
On this basis, Barton believes non-Catholics stand to gain from Mary MacKillop's sainthood.
''There's a sense of transference beyond the religious bounds … She's on our team, part of our family, and so we emotionally engage. It's the recognition of a local hero.''
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