A person becomes holy by being called holy. Followers name someone first, and any test comes afterward. The Catholic Church says as much: the first step of its process is popular acclaim. The sociologist Pierre Delooz made the same point decades ago when he argued that sanctity exists for other people.
Geography
The stars on our map mark the birthplaces of the 40 people in this register so far. They are a sample, chosen for the records they left, so the pattern says as much about who kept paper as about where holiness happens.
Who keeps a list
Very few traditions run a real filter. Rome has a court-like process, with medical boards for miracles. Orthodox and Coptic churches confirm veneration that already exists. Tibetan Buddhism has recognition, now under state rule in China. Most others have no certifier at all, and followers, a shrine and a book do the work. We found no formal register for Hindu gurus, Thai and Burmese saints, Indigenous prophets, folk saints or most new movements. See the registers.
The lists are lopsided
Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary counted Catholic confessors, the saints who were not martyrs. Only 34 were canonized between 1234 and 1584. By 2009 the total stood at 307. On our arithmetic from their tables, Italy took about 45 per cent of papal beatifications and canonizations. Popes respond to the number of candidates waiting, and since about 1900, the authors argue, to Protestant competition. That last point is their reading of the data.
A rough count on Wikidata finds 3,179 saints and blesseds who died in 1600 or later. About a quarter are women, and more than half died in the 1900s. It is an uneven volunteer dataset, so treat it as a pointer. Much of that rise reflects martyrs of the twentieth century, which is our inference and has not been tested.
Holy places can multiply too. One report by Radio Farda says Iran's imamzadeh shrines grew from about 1,500 before 1979 to more than 11,000 by 2020, though definitions vary and other figures exist.
Miracles became medical
Jacalyn Duffin studied 1,400 canonization miracles and found more than 95 per cent were healings. Since 1600 a miracle has largely become a medical event, and physicians are among its main witnesses.
From the edge of society
Scholars have long noticed holy people working from outside ordinary power. Peter Brown described the late antique holy man as an outside patron and mediator. Ernest Gellner found hereditary saints arbitrating between Atlas tribes. Stanley Tambiah traced Thai forest monks acclaimed on the periphery who became the center of a national amulet cult. Max Weber's idea of charisma ties them together: a claimed gift that rests on recognition by followers, and that must turn into an office or a lineage to survive its holder.
What we still don't know
We found no statistical study of Hindu, Sikh, Jain or Sufi holy people that matches the work on Christian saints. Some well-known figures on class and gender among saints could not be confirmed from the original books, so they aren't repeated here. The book will return to this question as the records come in.