How many Catholic saints are there?

"How many saints are there?" is one of the first questions children ask about the saints, and one of the hardest for anyone to answer. The honest reply is that nobody knows the exact number, and the Church has never tried to fix one. What we can give is a set of real numbers, each with its own meaning: the saints in the Church's official book, the saints canonized by each pope, and the great crowd in heaven whose names we will learn only there.

How many Catholic saints are there? The short answer

There are three ways to count, and they give three very different answers.

1. The official roll. The Roman Martyrology, the Church's liturgical book of saints, lists about 7,000 saints and blesseds in its current edition.
2. Formal canonizations. Since 1592, popes have canonized nearly 2,000 saints in about 180 ceremonies, according to the running tally kept by GCatholic.org.
3. Everyone in heaven. Every soul with God is a saint, and their number is known to God alone.

Most of the saints we love best fall outside the second number. St. Peter, St. Patrick and St. Nicholas were never canonized in a ceremony, because there was no such ceremony in their day. The Church honored them from the beginning, and the Martyrology carries their names.

The Roman Martyrology: about 7,000 saints and blesseds

The closest thing the Church has to an official list is the Martyrologium Romanum. Despite its name, it isn't only a book of martyrs. It names, day by day, the saints and blesseds whose feasts may be kept, with a line or two about each one. Monks and canons read it aloud in chapter every morning for centuries, and many religious communities still do.

The book has deep roots. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains that the Roman Martyrology "is in sum the martyrology of Usuard," a ninth-century monk of Paris, filled out from St. Gregory the Great's Dialogues and Greek sources. Pope Gregory XIII approved an edition in 1584 and "imposed [it] on the entire Church," and the great historian Cardinal Baronius revised it two years later.

After the Second Vatican Council the Martyrology was revised and published again in 2001, then in a second edition in 2004. When that edition was presented in Rome, the Vatican Information Service reported that it "contains 7,000 saints and blesseds currently venerated by the Church, and whose cult is officially recognized and proposed to the faithful as models worthy of imitation." The 2004 edition added the 117 people canonized or beatified since 2001, along with many Italo-Greek monks long honored in southern Italy whose names had never been written into the book.

Since 2004 the Church has raised thousands more to the altars, so the real figure today is higher. Those names will go into a future edition.

Why "more than 10,000"?

You will often read that there are "over 10,000 saints." That figure is an estimate, not an official count. It tries to include local saints honored in a single diocese or monastery for centuries, whose names never reached the Martyrology. It's a fair guess at the size of the Church's memory, but no Vatican document gives it.

Canonizations pope by pope

Formal canonization by the pope began with St. Ulrich of Augsburg in 993, and by the 13th century it was reserved to the Holy See. The figures below come from GCatholic.org's record of canonizations, which begins in 1592, and from the Holy See's own statistics for St. John Paul II. Group canonizations of martyrs make the totals jump.

• Pope Leo XIV (2025– ): 9 saints in 2 ceremonies so far. On September 7, 2025, he canonized St. Pier Giorgio Frassati and St. Carlo Acutis. On October 19, 2025, he canonized seven more, including St. José Gregorio Hernández, the first saint of Venezuela, St. Peter To Rot, the first of Papua New Guinea, and St. Bartolo Longo, the apostle of the Rosary at Pompeii.
• Pope Francis (2013–2025): 942 saints in 18 ceremonies. In his first canonization, on May 12, 2013, he raised to the altars Antonio Primaldo and his companions, the martyrs of Otranto, who were killed in 1480 for refusing to deny Christ. In his homily he called them "About 800 people"; GCatholic counts them as 813.
• Pope Benedict XVI (2005–2013): 45 saints in 10 ceremonies.
• St. John Paul II (1978–2005): 482 saints in 51 ceremonies, according to the Holy See Press Office, which also counts 1,338 men and women he beatified. GCatholic gives 483. Many of his saints were martyr groups: Korea, Vietnam, China, Mexico.
• St. Paul VI (1963–1978): 86 saints.
• Pope Leo XIII (1878–1903): 149 saints, more than any earlier pope in the tally.

The whole tally since 1592 comes to 1,988 saints. More than 1,400 of them are martyrs, many canonized in groups, such as the Vietnamese martyrs and the companions of St. Andrew Kim Taegon and St. Paul Miki.

And the blesseds?

Beatifications run even higher. GCatholic counts more than 1,500 men and women beatified under Pope Francis and more than 200 already under Pope Leo XIV, many of them martyrs of the 20th century in Spain, Mexico and Eastern Europe. Each of them is one step from canonization, and some will be canonized in the years ahead. Our page on beatification explains the steps, and Venerable and Servant of God covers the titles that come before.

Why the count can't be exact

Even with good records, several things keep the number fluid.

• The early saints were never formally listed. For the first thousand years a saint was recognized by the faithful and the local bishop. Many names survive in one ancient calendar or one church dedication.
• Groups. A single canonization can honor hundreds. The martyrs of Otranto are one entry in the liturgy and 813 people in the count.
• Saints and blesseds blur. Popular lists often mix them, and blesseds keep moving up.
• East and West. The Orthodox and Eastern churches keep many saints of their own, glorified in their own way, and some saints of the West are unknown in the East. Our page on how someone becomes a saint explains Orthodox glorification.
• Equivalent canonization. Popes sometimes extend to the whole Church the cult of a saint long honored in one place, without the full process, as Benedict XVI did for St. Hildegard of Bingen.

A multitude no one can number

In the end the numbers serve a deeper truth. The Church does not canonize saints to make a complete list. She canonizes some so that we have sure models and friends, and she trusts that heaven holds far more. St. John saw it in his vision: "a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and tribes, and peoples, and tongues" standing before the throne (Apocalypse 7:9, Douay-Rheims).

That is why the Church keeps All Saints' Day on November 1. It honors every saint in heaven, canonized or not: grandmothers and farmers, children and soldiers, whose holiness was known only to the people who loved them. Our Saints A to Z holds hundreds of full entries, and our feast days calendar shows who the Church remembers each day.

So the best answer to "how many saints are there?" is the one the liturgy gives: more than we can count, and room for more. Let us ask all the saints to pray for us, that we may one day be numbered among them.