Applying the Peter Principle to sainthood.
mar·tyr (mär t r)n.
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The Vatican has, apparently, decided to supplement this definition to include
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It seems that the new Pope has decided to revive the ancient Roman tradition of imperial deification, but to wedge that deification into the existing scaffolding of sainthood requires some fairly elaborate gymnastics; I'm not a RC, but from what I understand about RC saintification, the traditional method is thatyou need to either produce a couple of certifiable miracles or someone who's been martyred, then have the upper hierarchy of the church do the appropriate investigations to make sure they're really miracles, and only then can the (by now long dead) saint be tagged it. In recent years, the Church has streamlined this process a bit -- Mother Theresa wasn't even dead for six years before being beatified -- but Pope Ratzinger has decided to pull out all of the stops to get his ex-boss sainted ASAP. The Vatican used to have a devil's advocate who was assigned to go over canonization candidates with a fine-toothed comb, just to make sure that this holy person was indeed holy and not just a ringer that Satan dropped in to humiliate the church. Well, that post was dropped a few decades ago, to "streamline" things. A further streamlining was to drop the traditional "you need to wait five years before trying to canonise someone" -- some people were demanding an immediate canonisation at JP2's funeral, and apparently that was enough for the new Pope to waive that requirement. But there's always the ticklish matter of finding those two miracles; if I am not mistaken, the traditional Catholic miracle happens after you ask the spirit of the now-demised saint-to-be for intercession with the Head Office, and given that JP2's corpse had barely reached room temperature before the cries of immediate sanctification rang out, it Just Wouldn't Do to wait to see if the prayers of the faithful could provoke the required miracles.
Thus, call him a martyr, and if the cardinals can keep from giggling in public, that might be enough to plunk his bust down in the Vatican Hall of Fame. It's the least you can do for a Bishop of Rome who managed to canonise more people in his 20-odd year tenure than were canonised in the previous 500 years. Think of it as holy grade inflation.
(link via Suburban Guerrilla, "martyr" definition via dictionary.com)