Political canonizations

Insight I got at a recent Sunday-morning after-service church coffee time (often my breakfast) from one of the few parishioners on the same page as me on matters ecclesiastical (we have our differences but mad respect): both the canonizations of Josaphat (Kuntsevich) of Polotsk on the Catholic side and of Alexis Toth on the Orthodox one were politically motivated nasty statements about a rival church (people who switched churches and/or took people with them), not about figures the people were devoted to. In what I call the "infallible Sportsmen's Club" (the bar in the church basement or hall), my view of the church in down-home Pennsylvania and Ohio, the aging Slavic parishioners are devoted to St. Nicholas and St. Panteleimon, etc., not to these.