Canonization is the official act of saying that a dead person is a saint. In the Catholic Church this is a long, careful process, not a quick compliment. After it, people may call that person Saint, and some believers pray to them. The word is a noun: it names the act or the event. The verb is canonize. Writers also stretch it: the canonization of a novelist or a film can mean treating that work as a perfect classic that nobody may criticise. That stretch is real, but the church meaning is the home meaning. This has nothing to do with a cannon, the big gun — they only sound alike.