[1] In the Catholic Church, after a deceased Catholic has been declared a servant of God by a bishop and proposed for beatification by the pope, such a servant of God may next be declared venerable ("heroic in virtue") during the investigation and process leading to possible canonization as a saint.
The next steps are beatification, which normally requires a miracle by the intercession of the candidate, from which point the person is referred to as "The Blessed".
[2] The declaration of sainthood is definitive only to the extent that the Catholic Church claims the person died in the state of grace and already enjoys beatific vision.
[4] Other examples of venerables are Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Princess Louise of France, Francis Libermann, and Mother Mary Potter.
In the 20th century, some English-language Orthodox sources began to use the term venerable to refer to a righteous person who was a candidate for glorification (canonization), most famously in the case of John of Shanghai and San Francisco.