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In The Third Miracle, Ed Harris stars as lapsed priest who is engaged by the Church as a detective -- a spiritual investigator who examines miracles and saints just as a cop investigates crimes and murderers.
Harris' Father Frank is what the Catholic Church calls a "postulator" – a priest appointed by a local cardinal to evaluate a candidate for sainthood. A postulator examines the entire life, works and miracles of a saint and then either defends or denies their cause before the Church. Thus, he becomes not only a spiritual detective but a saintly advocate or lawyer.
The postulator does not have the authority to declare a person a saint. Rather, he is a tool of the Church, who is supposed to selflessly and objectively establish the truth. His role, according to Canon Law, is to "examine, collect, collate, and research historical and theological material about the individual for whom the honors of the altar are sought and to present that case to the bishop of the diocese and to the Holy See."
The first thing the postulator must do is to investigate every nook, cranny and painstaking detail of the candidate's life, from birth to the moment of death and beyond, interviewing witnesses, friends and family; perusing personal papers, published writings and examining Church documents. The investigation is extremely vital because any mistake about the person's virtue could prove extremely embarrassing to the Church. In one case, a postulator spent years attempting to create week-by-week diary of a sainthood candidate so he could be sure every moment of his life was virtuous. Often the research even involves exhuming the body of the candidate.
This in-depth examination can take years. If at last all seems in order, the postulator begins to collect evidence of the candidate's heroic virtues and of any miracles reported in connection with that person. Finally, when all the information has been gathered and sifted, the postulator presents a formal report of his findings – known as the positio -- to the Bishop. This report is the length of a doctoral thesis including a detailed biography, documents that support the argument, and eyewitness accounts.
If the Bishop is satisfied by the evidence in the positio, he will then petition the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the Vatican's official saint-making body, to decide if the case has merit. The entire process can take years, decades, sometimes even a lifetime of tireless pursuit on behalf of the postulator.
