FILE - This April 10, 2003 file photo shows Pope John Paul II looking at a white dove released in honor of his repeated calls for peace by Roman youths, in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican. (Massimo Sambucetti - AP) Atheists brought up in religious families travel many roads on their journey away from faith and, if my childhood mystification by the process leading to Catholic sainthood is any guide, the quickie beatification of Pope John Paul II this Sunday is likely to raise questions for a new generation of budding doubters. Beatification, for those not raised on the minutiae of Roman Catholicism, is the penultimate step on the ladder of sainthod.

John Paul, a charismatic figure beloved by those who either approve of or don’t care about the pontiff’s stonewalling of persistent allegations of sexual abuse by the clergy; his opposition to equality for women within the church; and his remaking of the Catholic hierarchy around the world in his own ossified theological image, is on the fast track to sainthood.

Everyone loved John Paul’s beatific smile. But when you look at the actual record of his 25-year papacy, characterized by resistance to holding bishops accountable for covering up clergy sex abuse and by an unremitting opposition to the ideal of aggiornamento (literally, bringing up to date) that Pope John XXIII tried to introduce at the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, it is difficult to see John Paul as either a saint or an effective leader. He presided over an era in which one out of four American-born Catholics left the church and in which new converts to Catholicism came primarily from the least educated regions of the earth.

Ordinarily, the church requires a five-year waiting period before the Vatican can even begin to investigate claims to sainthood but Pope Benedict XVI waived the usual rules for his more popular predecessor and began to grease the wheels soon after a French nun claimed that her Parkinson’s disease had been cured when she prayed to John Paul a few days after his death in 2005.

You need at least one certified miracle before beatification and, to no one’s surprise, Benedict upheld the judgement of Vatican medical experts (it would be instructive to see the nature of their scientific evidence) that the nun did indeed have Parkinson’s and was indeed cured by the soon-to-be-Blessed John Paul. (While one might, in theory, prove the former, it is impossible to prove the latter in the absence of direct communication with the next world.) A second miracle will be required for John Paul to be declared a bona fide saint but there is always another inexplicable cure tucked away in the Believe-It-Or-Not Supernatural Storehouse.

In interviews with The National Catholic Reporter, prominent Catholics who criticized the fast-tracking of the pontiff’s sainthood did so not because they disputed his personal piety but because they disputed his actions as pope. It seems reasonable to judge a papal candidate for sainthold on that basis, given that John Paul would hardly have been considered for beatification had he remained an ordinary, pious parish priest in Poland.

Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, one of those uppity American nuns who have repeatedly irked the Vatican, said John Paul’s attitude toward priestly sex abuse of children “embodied the worst kind of clericalism” and that “the least the church could do in respect for those who have already suffered insult at the hand of the church is to let the perspective of time decide whether or not canonization is in order.” Father Charles Curran, professor of theology at Southern Methodist University, said the church “would be a lot better off if we stopped canonizing popes, bishops, clergy and religious.”

Of course, you could find Catholic conservatives who are thrilled by the canonization express for John Paul. The theologians quoted in The National Catholic Reporter (like the newspaper itself) are not Vatican favorites. Father Curran, for example, was fired by the Catholic University of America after the Vatican chastised him for challenging church teaching on birth control and other social issues. And that’s why a Catholic priest is expounding Catholic theology at a non-Catholic university.

Sainthood decisions, certainly those involving high church officials in the modern era, are always political. In this case, the current pope is emphasizing his steadfast conservatism by pushing for the sainthood of his theologically conservative predecessor.

A decision so clearly political is bound to raise more doubts among Catholics who already doubt many of their church’s official teachings. Critics within the church have speculated that the rush to canonize John Paul owes much to the realization that two other 20th-century popes mentioned in the sainthood sweepstakes—John XXIII and Pius XII—are unsuitable for different reasons. John, who was beatified in 2000 (37 years after his death), represents liberalizing trends within the church that the current pope opposes and Pius—well, there are all those old accusations about his having turned a blind eye to the persecution of Jews by the Nazis.

Political considerations of a different kind were involved in the canonization of the saint who haunted my childhood--Maria Goretti, an 11-year-old virgn-martyr canonized in 1950. In her case, the the ecclesiastical politics revolved around the dour Pius XII’s desire to strike a blow against what he considered the sexual licentiousness of the post-World War II era in the West.

The hapless and helpless Maria, a poor southern Italian girl, was only 11 when she was stabbed to death in 1902 for resisting the teenager trying to rape her. In class, we were treated more than once to a replay of this inspiring event on a recording, in which the Maria character emitted blood-curdling screams while yelling, “No, no, it is a sin—God forbids it.” To top off this lovely story, Maria’s attacker—having served his time in prison and repented—was in St. Peter’s Square when his victim was canonized by Pius.

The nuns considered Maria a wonderful example for pubescent girls and this exaltation of chastity at any price played a considerable role in my expanding doubts about Catholicism. It occurred to me that Maria herself might still have been alive—though not canonized—if she had not fought her would-be rapist. Somehow, it just didn’t seem fair that he got to celebrate in Rome while she had been dead, virginity intact, for 48 years. And why was it worth your life, anyway, to remain a virgin? These were my thoughts at age 11, when my disgust at the Maria Goretti record proved one of many milestones on my own road to reason.

Whether we are talking about a terrified 11-year-old or a pope, there is something about the obvious, fallible humanity of any purported saint who has only recently lived and walked among us that is hard to swallow even for people who believe in the supernatural. Was John Paul II a holier man than the dissident theologians he rebuked or than the child-victims whose cries went unheard on his watch by the bishops of his church?