ONE of the pioneers of education for young women in middle America was a lady born in France in 1798 as Anne-Therese Guerin. She spent much of her life as a nun in Indiana, founding a religious order and setting up many schools. She became better known under her monastic name of Mother Theodore; by the time of her death in 1856, she was the leader of a flourishing community called the Sisters of Providence. A "cause" or procedure for proclaiming her a saint—a holy figure, living beyond the grave in a state close to God—was started in 1907. Things moved faster in the late 20th century. In October 1998, Pope John Paul II bestowed on her the intermediate title of "blessed"—after the church had satisfied itself that at least one miracle had occurred through her prayers in the after-life. Pope Benedict then made her a full saint after certifying that a second miracle had taken place; a grand canonisation ceremony took place in Rome in 2006.

As canonisation procedures in the Western world go, that one was probably middle-of-the-range in cost and complexity. Because she lived a long time ago, there was no chance to interview people who knew her; but as always, many documents had to be exchanged between her home patch and Rome, and medical expertise was needed to check out the veracity of the miracles. And when American professional services are required at any stage in the chain, that never comes cheap. In American Catholic circles, the cost of a cause is reckoned to be around $250,000 and it can easily go higher.

All of that offers some background to the announcement this week by Cardinal Angelo Amato, head of the Vatican Congregation or department that assesses prospective saints, that a "reference price list" for the various services involved in preparing a canonisation had been introduced. In particular, there would now a guide price for the services of a "postulator"—a person trained in canon law who prepares a detailed biography of the proposed saint. Some postulators offer their services free as part of their obligations to the religious order to which they belong. For others, preparing hagiographic documents is a day job, the way they make a living.

To mitigate the danger of favouring only the rich, the Cardinal's department already exercises some positive discrimination (in its allocation of time) in favour of proposals from less well-off countries, and it welcomes voluntary donations to support the cost of poor-world applications. But quite a lot of its energy has been taken up recently with processing the fast-track canonisations of two recent popes (John XXIII and John Paul II) which will be celebrated in April; that has probably worsened the backlog and it may have opened the way for opportunistic price hikes.

People who know the Vatican say the world of professional postulators is a small and introverted one, not dissimilar to the coterie of canon lawyers who handle applications for the annulment of marriages. Like any group of people in any country who hold the key to an elaborate legal procedure (from buying a house to dissolving a company) they have an interest in keeping the rules, and the price structure for their services, as complex and opaque as possible. And these highly specialised church lawyers, who are mostly Italian, feel insecure at the moment because of the relative de-Italianisation of the Vatican under the Argentine pope. Postulators hardly make a fortune, but that probably makes them all the more protective of their arcane skill-set.

Anyway, setting a fixed price-list for sainthood services isn't just a free gift to tabloid headline writers; it's one small step in the process of reining the vast and self-serving bureaucratic interests that surround and encumber the Vatican. As Pope Francis well knows, he will have to go a lot further than that.