Saints, today

The numerous canonizations which have taken place in the final years of the twentieth century constitute a reminder of the call to holiness that the Church continues to ring out. The Second Vatican Council highlighted the universal vocation to holiness. It reminded the children of the Church that each one, in his own state and circumstances, is called to Christian life coherently.

The path to holiness is not only for some, it’s for all. This is no novelty: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification,” we read in 1 Thessalonians. In these days during which in a special way we are conscious of the Holy Year, we do well to remember that the Eternal Word, upon becoming man in the immaculate womb of the always Virgin Mary, comes to us as the Way to the fullness of life, as the paradigm of great holiness. He provides us with the “example of holiness in daily life,” and in this manner invites everyone to live from day to day according to the Plan of God.

The Saints

The thousands of saints whom we can call canonized in a broad sense, as they have come to be called for many centuries, don’t constitute the total number of saints. This should remain clear. The processes of beatification and canonization have a specific and definitely valuable meaning for the life of the Church. If I have the facts right, since, at the end of the 16th century when Pope Sixtus V created a congregation to oversee the causes of saints, until this year in which the Great Jubilee begins, there will have been 1,742 blesseds and 591 saints proclaimed. To them we add those who have been ecclesially recognized before that date.

But all these publicly recognized saints are not many, and that discourages some people. As one author has said, they are like a “selection among many saints.” Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in an important interview: “the number of saints is, thanks to God, incomparably greater than the group of figures which stand out by way of canonization.” And he added with ecclesial realism: “there are many more saints than can be possibly canonized.” Applying the principle, with an example he himself cites, he points out that Saint Therese of Lisieux is the prototype of “a movement of little saints.”

That’s how it is, then: those who reach the altars are an example that holiness is possible, they are an incentive to pursue the path of coherence in Christian life, a luminous reminder of the uncountable millions of saints that exist.

Daily Life

A great theologian of the 20th century, Romano Guardini, once dealt with the theme of ‘the saint in our world’ in a conference. He spoke of the “saint of the extraordinary” and also of the “saint of the invisible,” which in all fairness could refer to many unknown men and women who live their Christian lives coherently. He pointed to “the totality of life itself,” marked by an “ever greater purity of love, with which the requirements of the situation must be carried out each time,” as characteristic of this type of sanctity. Starting out from the consciousness of the faith and the path that it illuminates, it’s a matter of living and acting coherently with the faith, that is, “just as God wants,” he says. Guardini is referring to what today we call the docile response to the Plan of God in daily life.

Cardinal Ratzinger seems to be referring to something similar when he speaks of the “miracle of an entire life joined to God,” “a miracle which God works always anew.” And it’s that the invitation to holiness which can reach extraordinary dimensions in a number of cases, is more likely, in the great majority of cases, to be an unfolding in the “invisibility of daily life,” giving with it glory to God. It’s a thinking, living, and acting in the normal circumstances of daily life according to the lights given us by the faith of the Church, invaluable treasure for those who want to walk the pilgrimage rightly.

The Challenge

Guardini reminds us of the meaning that the reference to the Christians as “the saints” had in the time of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Being Christian was an option which radiated all through the life of a person and put him in opposition to options which went against the Plan of God, just as it opposed him to a culture which didn’t respond to that Plan. It was, therefore, a radical option, full of consequences, that went to the roots of the person and his unfolding development. After the hunger of God, it was a receiving of the Lord Jesus, a living as the People of God, and an answering of His call day to day. We thus had an option which was ratified day to day by fidelity to God’s call to coherent Christian life.

Today, times are like they were then. We are in the midst of a culture that’s becoming more and more secularized, a culture of death whose parameters infiltrate and confuse. The option for the Christian life, for coherence, requires a clear consciousness of the faith, of Christian identity, and a response to grace in order to coherently live according to the great lesson that the Lord Jesus has given us and that the Church carries forth by the guidance of Her Magisterium. It’s a matter of living daily in and according to Christ. That is the path of holiness.

Notice: These articles have been translated by members of the Christian Life Movement and have not been revised by the author.

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