devil's advocate

In common parlance, a devil's advocate is someone who takes a position he or she does not agree with for the sake of argument. This process can be used to test the quality of the original argument and identify weaknesses in its structure.

Origin

During the canonization process of the Roman Catholic Church, the Promoter of the Faith (Latin: Promotor Fidei), popularly known as the Devil's Advocate (Latin: advocatus diaboli), is a canon lawyer appointed by Church authorities to argue against the canonization of the candidate.^[1] It is his or her job to take a skeptical view of the candidate's character, to look for holes in the evidence, to argue that any miracles attributed to the candidate were fraudulent, etc. The Devil's advocate opposes God's advocate (Latin: Advocatus Dei; also known as the Promoter of the Cause), whose task is to make the argument in favor of canonization. This task is now performed by the Promoter of Justice (promotor iustitiae), who is in charge of examining how accurate is the inquiry on the saintliness of the candidate.

The office was established in 1587 during the reign of Pope Sixtus V and reformed by Pope John Paul II in 1983. This reform streamlined the canonization process considerably, helping John Paul II to usher in an unprecedented number of elevations: nearly 500 individuals were canonized and over 1,300 were beatified during his tenure as Pope as compared to only 98 canonizations by all his 20th-century predecessors.

Such a dramatic increase suggests that the office of the Devil's Advocate had served to reduce the number of canonizations by complicating the process. Some argue that it served a useful role in ensuring that canonizations did not proceed without due care and hence the status of sainthood was not easily achieved. In cases of controversy the Vatican may still seek to informally solicit the testimony of critics of a candidate for canonization. The British born American columnist Christopher Hitchens was famously asked to testify against the beatification of Mother Teresa in 2002, a role he would later humorously describe as being akin to "representing the Evil One, as it were, pro bono".^[2]

See also

• Roman Rota
• Dialectic
• Polemic

References

External links

Look up devil's advocate in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• "Advocatus Diaboli". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01168b.htm. 
•  "Promotor Fidei". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Promotor_Fidei. 
• The Advocatus Diaboli as a destructive team role (page 11)
• The Advocatus Diaboli as a constructive team role for team decisions