On Sanctity

Taken “The Faith of the Saints,” Imprimatur + Joseph Cardinal Ritter, Archbishop of St. Louis.

It is a well-known fact that Catholics, as a general rule, show honor to the “saints.” Who are saints and how they became saints are questions with which this pamphlet is chiefly concerned. Not everyone who leads a consistently holy life is called a “saint.” Even a more than normally holy or useful life is not sufficient qualification. The title is reserved only for those who have, during life, attained a heroic degree of Christian perfection and, after death, have been officially declared by the Catholic Church to be in heaven, enjoying the happiness of the vision of God.
The Catholic Church declares only Catholics to be saints since she has spiritual jurisdiction only over her own members. Human goodness may be found wherever men live; Christ-like perfection is to be looked for in the true Church of Jesus Christ. Christ’s Church was founded to make men holy. Within that Church the fullness of His design can be realized. That is why the heroic and integrally Christian life which makes a person a saint can be lived within the Catholic Church.
At the present time, the word “saint” in Catholic usage has come to have a very precise and technical meaning. The Bible uses it, too, but in a much broader sense. The book of Psalms has a hymn which begins “Sing to the Lord, O ye his saints” (Ps. 29:5). The saints spoken of in this passage were all the good Jews who came to pray.
St. Paul uses the word very often. He begins his Epistle to the Philippians with: “To all the saints in Christ Jesus that are at Philippi” (Phil. 1:1).
That was the usual way in which he addressed all his converts. Now it must be granted that the earliest Christians were extraordinarily good people. But they were not all so good as to merit the name of “saint” in its present sense.
At Corinth St. Paul could see with his own eyes that the Church had in it scheming rascals, weak brethren, money-grabbers, and even an incestuous Christian. Yet he addressed them as “saints.” It was more in hope than in reality. Indeed, he himself makes that clear at the beginning of his first letter to them when he calls them not “saints,” but “you who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be saints” (1 Cor. 1:2).

Paul’s labors
St. Paul, however, deserved the title in the fullness of its meaning. All Christian tradition has agreed to that. It will be found in all copies of the Bible. By examining his life and the lives of a few others, we shall soon discover the essential quality of sanctity.
There is no doubt that Paul of Tarsus was an outstanding man. He began his work when the Christian community was so small that it was considered just a sect of the Jews. Paul, himself a Jew, undertook to destroy this new “heresy” while it was still a little thing in Jerusalem and Damascus and a few other towns.
He ended his work some thirty years later in a dark Roman prison as the chief organizer of Christian communities. By that time the Christian Church was a worldwide religious movement. Paul could look to Corinth and Thessalonica, Philippi and Boerea, and indeed to all of Greece; to Ephesus, Antioch of Pisidia, and the whole hinterland of Asia Minor; probably also to Spain and to the Roman population itself and say, “There is my work.”
Today Corinth, Philippi, Ephesus and many of the other cities to which his Epistles were addressed lie in ruins. But Paul’s influence has been lasting even when his churches have not been. His instructions live on and shape men’s lives today. He treated of almost all those world-shaking ideas which Christianity brought to men, and he did it with such profundity that men still weigh his words with scholarly precision to estimate their ultimate meaning.
Even more is due to him. Organization of churches is important, explanations of Catholic doctrine are more son. But all would have soon been lost had not Paul’s own love of truth been the spark of ignition which set a world on fire.
He was, indeed, a great man, one of that handful of genuises whose work has shaped our world. For that reason we respect him. But it is not for that we call him “Saint” Paul.
He was a saint because he was a holy man, not because he was a great one. Almost half his life as a Christian was spent alone, perfecting his own character. After his conversion he retired into the desert of Arabia and for fourteen years gave himself up to contemplating the things of God. How deeply he penetrated those mysteries is evident from his own account.
“If I must boast–it is not indeed expedient to do so–but I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago–whether in the body I do not know, or out of the body I do not know, God knows–such a one was caught up to the third heaven. And I know such a man–whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows–that he was caught up into paradise and heard secret words that man may not repeat” (2 Cor. 12:1-4).
Paul is, of course, speaking of his own self, but his saintly humility will not permit him to mention himself directly. It was by such daily striving to empty himself and seek only God, that he became a saint.

Paul’s sufferings
Zealous as he was for his own sanctification, he was bound to become zealous for other men. Years later he was to count up what it cost him to labor for others.
“From the Jews five times I received forty lashes less one. Thrice I was scourged, once I was stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I was adrift on the sea; in journeyings often, in perils from floods, in perils from robbers, in perils from my own nation, in perils from the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils from false brethren; in labor and hardships, in many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Besides these outer things, there is my daily pressing anxiety, the care of all the churches” (2 Cor. 11:24-28).
A genius might have said this boastfully; Paul was a saint. He recounted these heroic sufferings with a simple and absolute humility, conscious of his own place before God.
“By the grace of God I am what I am, an his grace in men has not been fruitless–in fact I have labored more than any of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me” (1 Cor. 15:10).
Perhaps the most graphic description of the saint emerges from his Letter to the Philippians. It was written from a prison in Rome by an old man who faced the prospect of death. It has a simple, almost gay keynote–Rejoice! It was Paul who consoled the Philippians, not they him. He thoughtfully thanked them for their concern over him, told them of new conquests for Christ even in the prison, urged them to be humble, and rejoiced again that God’s will was being done. That cheerful martyr was a saint.
It is not for natural genius that we call Paul “saint.” It is for that altogether extraordinary combination of all Christian virtues in his life which rose from the grace of God within him.
The men and women whom the Catholic Church calls by the title of “saint” are legion. They come from every walk of life, and their lives were lived in every conceivable circumstance. But one thing is common to all. They were superhumanly good.

St. Vincent de Paul
Two of them will give some idea of the common denominator in the midst of the most elaborate diversity. The first of them was a man whom the world would certainly consider saintly. He was a seventeenth century French priest, Vincent de Paul. Of simple, peasant stock, he was methodical and plodding in his ways; but he had a genius for organization. He was among the first and possibly the greatest of those who have labored in modern times for social betterment of the poor and the underprivileged.
What he accomplished can hardly be told briefly. He began one Sunday by asking his congregation to bring food to a sick family. So effective was his plea that the needy parishioners were flooded with perishable food stuffs–only to be left again in want when the sudden abundance had been used or spoiled. Vincent de Paul set out to draw up a simple but workable plan of continued relief which was effective, but not impersonal.
The little crises which he met led him to crises on a broader scale which he determined to attack. Step by step he felt his way. The rich he attracted to himself, and then for the love of Go stripped them of their surplus wealth to feed the poor. The poor he fed; the orphans he housed and clothed; institutions were established for boys to learn a trade; young girls were provided with an honest livelihood and a chance to marry; fallen women were brought back to decency; hospitals were filled with volunteer workers. So great did his charitable work grown that at one time during a civil war in France, he fed and clothed a considerable part of the country. He became a national hero, and his statue stands among the immortals of his country in the Pantheon of Paris.
But Vincent de Paul was not just a man who felt sorry for his neighbors because they were badly fed and badly clothed. He felt most sorry for them because they led bad lives. He knew that many were not deliberately wicked; but they were ignorant, and they lacked that contact with religion which could make them better. So he organized his attack on ignorance and weakness. He sent out trained assistants to preach to the poor and abandoned people of the countryside. And he set forth to reform the most important people of all, the clergy who should have been the reformers.
Anyone with human sympathy, Catholic or not, would know Vincent de Paul for what he was–a very good man. Vincent de Paul thought of himself quite otherwise. He considered himself honestly and surprisingly as the greatest of sinners. Others might be surprised at all the good he accomplished; he was utterly astounded. And he kept saying that it was not he who did all these things, but the good God Who used the weakest and most despicable human agents he could find. That is why he was much more than a merely good man, and is honored as a saint.

St. Theresa
Now let us look at another side of sainthood. The Catholic Church honors as a saint another native of France, this time a young woman who lived in the past century. She did nothing to help her fellow man; nothing, anyway, that the unobserving could see. She died when she was only twenty-four. Almost all of her adult life she spent in utter obscurity behind the walls of a convent.
Undoubtedly, people would have admitted that she lived a good life behind her convent walls. And some would say that it was a quite useless life. So why does the Catholic Church honor her as a saint?
She was a genius in bringing one human being to the peak of perfection—herself. She was ardent in the love of God as others are ardent in the love of human beings. Day by day she strove to make herself more humble, more resigned to God’s will, more interested in the things which would suit her to live in heaven.
Of course, in doing this she did actually help others enormously. That, in fact, was her only real interest in wanting to get to heaven in a hurry. She said that she could do more good for people when she was there. And she was interested in doing all sorts of good for people; not just for some people whom she liked, but for everybody. Though she lived all her adult life within one building, her concerns were as wide as the world.
The way in which this worked out cannot be described so neatly as in the case of St. Vincent de Paul. The process was completely supernatural. Theresa helped others by praying for them. Now every human being prays, and God listens to them. Sometimes the results of prayer are quite amazing. But when Theresa prayed, the results were most startling. Missionaries in far-off countries suddenly found conversion possible. The weak and despairing at home found strength they had not suspected. All this came from the prayers of one “useless” woman in a convent.
Once again the common denominator is present. Theresa never pretended that this startling holiness and effectiveness at prayer was due to some special genius of her own. It was due to God who accomplished all. For herself she would have chosen complete nothingness.

Why the Church honors saints
Here, then, is a common note of the utmost importance in showing why the Catholic Church honors some of her sons and daughters as saints. Saints are certainly good persons and in one way or another do good for others. But that is not the precise reason why they are called saints.
There are many persons in this world who do wonders for their fellow men. Sometimes they have religious motives in mind; sometimes they have only their own publicity in mind. Some of them are thrown into work for their neighbor as a rather desperate justification for their life; they want to leave the world a little bit better place to live than they found it. And some few of them have no religion at all. The Catholic Church is certainly not cynical about those who are sincere in their efforts; but she does not ever imagine that they are saints. Sanctity is a startling kind of goodness, well-rounded and complete, overflowing in good works only because of the God-given grace that makes all this possible.
Sometimes it is said, “The life of a saint just isn’t natural.” The lives of those saints who have given themselves wholly to prayer, particularly the women saints among them, seem to strike some as abnormal and warped.
Indeed, their lives are not natural. That is the precise point of sainthood. The virtues of the saints are as much above human achievement as heaven is beyond the unaided grasp of natural men.
The lives of the saints were supernatural, not natural. Aided by God’s help, they made an effort each day to do His will, steadily increasing their friendship with Him. They were cheerful. They were quite happy. They had developed to the highest degree possible the powers of human nature. They had the richest personalities.

The finger of God
And that is the common denominator which we have pointed out in the stories of St. Paul, St. Vincent and St. Theresa. It was not that they were good people, or vastly successful people in religious matters. It was that they were so good that the only explanation was that the finger of God was doubtless upon them. They were supernaturally good.
But supernatural goodness is not all that is needed to be a saint. What is needed in addition is an official pronouncement upon the matter. Who shall tell when a man passes that borderline between striving to be good and supernatural holiness? Only an officially designated judge can do so. That judge for Catholics is the Catholic Church.
The method by which the Catholic Church judges whether a person is truly a saint is called “canonization.” This means that the person meets certain requirements and his name is worthy of being inscribed in the list (“canon”) of the saints.
Before this declaration, no one can be honored by public prayers. The private persuasion of individuals is another matter. If a Catholic is in heaven, then certainly he can help others here on earth by his influence with God. But for the Church at large, there must be certainty for all and that certainty can come only with the solemn declaration of sainthood by the Catholic Church.