Advocates longing for a future filled with contemporary American saints heard the Holy Spirit whisper, “If you build it, they will come.” So they built their “field of dreams,” opening the nation’s first Center for Sainthood Studies — the only such resource and training facility outside the Vatican — on the campus of St. Patrick’s Seminary and University in Menlo Park in June 2025.

And they came.

Forty registrants — twice as many as hoped for — arrived for the center’s Feb. 15–21, 2026 inaugural offering of an annual certificate program that teaches the ins and outs of advancing candidates for canonization.

The group hailed from 20 states and comprised 12 priests, three religious sisters, and 25 lay women and men of varying ages — from their 30s to their 80s — and from diverse walks of life, from a canon lawyer for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to the head of the world’s police psychologists.

They came for different reasons and with disparate levels of experience. Some wanted to learn from scratch, some to fill in gaps in what they already knew, and some to delve deeply into the complicated, complex process they hope to use to augment the number of saints, which currently tops 10,000.

Thirty came with a specific modern‑day man, woman, or child in mind for that holy honor, including:

— A former Navy pilot who took an unhesitating, fatal leap into a septic tank on the family farm to save his 20‑year‑old son with Down syndrome who had fallen into the sewage. — A Beverly Hills mother of seven who renounced her considerable worldly possessions to live in a 10‑by‑10‑foot cell and minister to inmates at one of Mexico’s most notorious prisons for 36 years. — A teen three days shy of high school graduation who lunged at a gun‑wielding assailant to spare his classmates at the cost of his own life.

Exemplary as they may have been, they still face a long and winding road to sainthood.

“We don’t want sentiment: we want scrutiny; we want surety… we want a secure saint, not a fake one,” said Msgr. Brian Taylor, who holds a doctorate in canon law and is judicial vicar and head of the Metropolitan Tribunal in the Archdiocese of New York. “Even Pope St. John Paul II, as good as he was, had to be put through the whole process of canonization,” he reminded the class.

That process — which can begin no sooner than five years after death and in the parish where the person died — involves intense inquiry and investigation into the candidate’s life, writings, and reputation for holiness at each of the following general steps:

1. A postulator (case guide and overseer versed in canon law) or some other appropriate party petitions the local bishop to open a cause.

2. If the prelate finds sufficient evidence to do so and the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints — which currently is reviewing more than 1,500 cases — has no objection and issues a nihil obstat, the candidate receives the title “servant of God” and moves on to the Roman phase of examinations.

3. If Vatican experts corroborate the diocesan findings of “heroic virtue” and the pope affirms, the servant of God is elevated to “venerable.”

4. Confirmation by diocesan and Vatican authorities of a miracle attributable to the venerable’s intercession moves the case to beatification and the designation of “blessed.” Martyrs are exempt from this requirement.

5. Upon verification in the diocese and Rome of a second miracle, the pope has the final authority to canonize a saint, proposed as an intercessor and held up as a model of holiness worthy of imitation and veneration.

The length, demand, and rigor of the painstaking process become evident when one considers that Thomas Vander Woude, the Vietnam War veteran who jumped into the toxic tank to rescue the youngest of his seven sons, Joseph, in 2008; Mother Antonia Brenner, née Mary Clarke and aptly dubbed “the prison angel,” who died in 2013; and Kendrick Castillo, the 18‑year‑old who thwarted a potential school massacre in 2019, are still awaiting initiation.

“I wanted to encourage everybody, whatever stage you’re at in this process, that our Lord wants this work to happen,” said Michael McDevitt, the sainthood center’s co‑founder and communications director.

Sharing the hardships he overcame over decades of promoting Servant of God Cora Evans, a U.S. housewife and convert from Mormonism whose case now rests in Roman hands, he declared: “You can just feel the Holy Spirit at work!”

Feeling the Spirit, promoters are proceeding with their causes.

Keith Henderson, a former financial adviser from Lake Frederick, Virginia, first heard about Vander Woude over lunch with his new pastor. Driving home, “as God would have it,” he happened upon a radio discussion of Venerable Jérôme Lejeune’s regrets over his 1958 discovery of the chromosome associated with Down syndrome because it led to the unintended consequence of boosting abortion rates.

“I was thinking, ‘Here’s a man who died saving this boy with Down’s, while others were killing such babies,’” said Henderson, a Catholic convert. Unfazed by the initial official rejection of his proposal, he sought more information, met with Joseph and others who had known his father well, founded a nonprofit, set up a website, gave talks, and waded through a flood of invitations and reports of prayer favors attributed to the man reputed for selfless acts and charitable works.

With bundles of new material, he made a second appeal.

“I told the vicar general of our diocese that an old retired priest and three converts are starting this cause, and he said, ‘Make that four converts!’ I didn’t realize he had converted in college,” Henderson related. “It didn’t take him long to understand this is something that needed to be done.”

Henderson signed up for the conference at the bucolic 60‑bedroom Vallombrosa Retreat Center in Menlo Park to find out exactly what needs to be done and how.

Working with a postulator to ensure “all our ducks were in a row,” Sister Anne Marie Maxfield of the Eudist Servants of the 11th Hour in Bakersfield, California, and other members of the self‑supporting order for mature women founded by Mother Antonia left the petition to open her cause with the archbishop.

Before he could sign, he lost his long battle with cancer in October 2025, leaving the case in limbo until the pope appoints his replacement, a procedure that can take months.

“The Holy Spirit is in charge, so when He wants it to happen, it’ll happen,” said Sister Maxfield, a close aide and travel companion for nearly seven years of the twice‑divorced socialite who took up the habit at age 50, moved to La Mesa Penitentiary in Tijuana, and spent the rest of her life giving drug lords, murderers, and thieves a spiritual makeover.

“I feel completely unqualified to even come here, uncertain I can retain what I learn, but I remember the saying that God doesn’t choose the qualified, he qualifies the chosen,” said Sister Maxfield, 84. “I’m going to do whatever the Holy Spirit guides me to do.”

Father Patrick DiLoreto, associate vocations director for the Diocese of Colorado Springs, has recognized the Holy Spirit is guiding him to champion Kendrick’s cause.

The parochial vicar at St. Mark Catholic Church in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, was a seminarian in Denver when news broke of the high school senior’s heroic deed.

“I thought to myself, ‘I wonder if he’ll be a saint someday,’” he said.

Six years later, the thought recurred as he drove on the newly minted Kendrick Castillo Way to St. Mark, two miles from the site of the shooting.

Not wanting to appear “rash,” he prayed for two months before broaching the topic with his pastor only to find they were of like minds.

“The two of us took it as a sign that it’s something the Holy Spirit has been telling both of us to consider,” Father DiLoreto said.

From his preliminary research, a picture emerged of a young man with a passion for robotics, a devout, pro‑life Catholic active in the Knights of Columbus, who enjoyed spending time in adoration and at Mass. If he saw a poorly attended funeral, he would go in to pray for the deceased. If a friend suffered a setback, he would jump in his Jeep and buy him ice cream. He prayed aloud before every meal, even in public places.

“Kendrick was not a soldier; he was not a police officer; he was not a firefighter,” Father DiLoreto noted. “He was just a kid, just a high school student who loved his neighbor and throughout his life showed charity for that neighbor.”

At his funeral, Bishop Jorge Rodríguez, the auxiliary bishop of Denver, cited John 15:13: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Young, contemporary, and thrust into a 21st‑century student’s worst nightmare, Kendrick provides a remarkable yet relatable model of how to answer the universal call to holiness.

“It’s easier for us to pursue holiness when we have a tangible example of somebody closer to our age and struggling with the same issues we have in America,” Father DiLoreto said. “It would be great if Kendrick was somebody the Lord wished to raise to the altar.”

Since this is a first for the archdiocese, his bishop sent him to the conference to gain insights into how to proceed through the preliminary investigations to initiate the cause.

The conference provided numerous tools to that end: the curriculum; study materials taken from the Vatican’s website; The Handbook on the Causes of Saints: The Diocesan Phase, translated into English by the sainthood center and co‑authored by Emanuele Spedicato and Waldery Hilgeman, two esteemed postulators versed in canon law and proficient in case presentation who flew in from Rome to teach the course; and fellow students more experienced and further along on the sainthood trail.

All of the above proved invaluable to Father Thomas Grafsgaard, postulator for Servant of God Michelle Duppong, a North Dakota campus missionary and evangelist who succumbed to cancer at age 31 on Christmas Day in 2015.

“This process has never been done in the history of the state of North Dakota,” said the pastor of St. Joseph Church in Beulah and St. Martin Church in Hazen, North Dakota. “I was so eager to attend this program, I was the second one to sign up!”

He was so eager because although he never met her, he was deeply inspired by the radiant farm girl’s joyful witness to Jesus, even during excruciating treatments in the hospital.

Whether ministering on four college campuses with the Fellowship of Catholic University Students or directing faith formation in the diocese, she encouraged growth in holiness in the ordinariness of life.

“That was a big passion of hers, that saints aren’t just for other people, they’re for you and me,” Father Grafsgaard said.

With the opening of the country’s only sainthood center, “there’s going to be the ability for the Church to now recognize a wider swath of cultures, of cross sections of different vocations,” he predicted.

The California facility provides training in the canonization process previously available only in Italian and solely at the Holy See, leaving out anyone who didn’t speak the language or couldn’t get to Rome, observed Siobhan Verbeek of Potomac, Maryland, director of canonical services for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“I really do see it as the Spirit’s work, and I do see it as such a positive element of the Church,” said Verbeek, whose responsibilities include presenting formation programs for bishops on canonization. “It’s filling a great need.”

It fills the need to finally focus on a topic too long neglected in the United States, said Father Luis Largaespada, pastor of St. Hugh Catholic Church in Miami, one of the more experienced attendees whose work spans the gamut of the path to canonization, from initiating causes to investigating miracles to exhibiting the relics of and spreading devotions to Venezuela’s first two saints canonized in 2025.

The center fills the need to gather and inform people interested in pushing for causes of candidates, “men and women who lived such a beautiful life for the Lord,” he said. “What we want to do is to present them to the Church as examples of the triumph of the Lord.”

The broad range of examples presented at the seminar has important implications, said Deacon Dominick Peloso, director of Vallombrosa, the host of the conference and the only Catholic retreat center in the San Francisco Archdiocese.

The intense spirituality of monks and hermits can be inspiring, “but how many of us are going to go in the desert and live superheroic lives?” he asked.

Impressed with the healthy turnout, Peloso expressed optimism about the program’s future.

“I think it will open so many doors for people wanting to promote their loved ones, even just the people in their dioceses, from their parishes, and getting people to think about holiness in their daily lives,” predicted Mary Batey, 31, communications, annulments and chaplain manager at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in The Woodlands, Texas, and one of 10 attendees without a candidate.

“I think this will start a new renaissance in the American church, a renaissance of saints,” she said.

Already, discussions in the classroom and over meals have revived a desire for introspection in Stephanie Barone McKenny of Rancho Palos Verdes, California, who oversees the world’s 200 police psychologists serving more than 32,000 police chiefs.

“When they talk about the characteristics of heroic virtues, because I don’t have a particular cause, I wind up doing self‑evaluation,” said the chair of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Police Psychological Services Section. “Because secretly, the hope is I want to be a saint.”

A post‑event survey of participants realized the organizers’ hopes.

“The inaugural certificate program was an overwhelming success,” said Travis Degheri, the center’s executive director who has worked on causes, including that of Cora Evans, for a decade. “I heard nothing but good things from everyone who talked about their experience.”

Thus, he plans few changes for the next session, scheduled for Jan. 31–Feb. 6, 2027.

Pressed to be both affordable and sustainable and currently operating at a significant loss, the leadership is considering increasing the all‑inclusive fee of $2,500 for the course, room, board, and certificate of “achievement and readiness” issued to graduates and signed by the archbishop.

“We need to find a good balance while also exploring the possibility of identifying donors that could help offset costs of the program,” Degheri said.

To Ellen Hogarty, director of Our Lady’s Youth Center in Vado, New Mexico, the course proved invaluable.

“We hear these wonderful stories about very ordinary people, and they’re not all mystics; they’re moms, they’re husbands, they’re farmers, so it’s encouraging to the normal Catholic, the Catholic in the pew that, yes, we’re all called to holiness,” said Hogarty, promoter of the cause of Servant of God Richard Thomas, a Jesuit priest dedicated to the poor. “The universal call to holiness is something we can all respond to.”

And if we do, we just might find ourselves coming to the field of dreams God has built for us in heaven.