All Saints

Since the very earliest days of the Church, Christians have venerated those people who showed heroic devotion to the faith, to the truth, and to the life and the way that Jesus taught and embodied.  Perhaps our very first hagiography, or saint-story, is told in chapters six and seven of the Acts of the Apostles where we read about Stephen, one of the first deacons and first martyrs for the faith.

Remembering and venerating the saints is an important part of the Catholic and Orthodox traditions and an important part of our spiritual growth.  The saints’ lives are edifying—they show us how different people in different places and different times, sinners just like us, followed Christ and found themselves with Christ in everlasting glory.

Some people have argued that a cult of saints is unnecessary, perhaps even sacrilegious.  For these people, the only model is Jesus himself.  WWJD is their watchword.  Simply consider “what would Jesus do”, act accordingly, and all will be right in the world.  Of course, Jesus is the perfect model, and WWJD can certainly be a useful discipline.  But if we ignore the saints, or pretend that they are irrelevant, are we then to suppose that nobody, in the two thousand years since Christ walked this earth, has ever followed His way?  Would it not be the ultimate hubris to believe that we will be the first successful disciples, simply because we’ve adopted WWJD as our way of life?

We are mere mortals.  We discourage easily.  The saints offer us hope that even when we fail, even when we sin, the Spirit is stronger than us.  The Holy Spirit has worked through uncounted millions of people just like us, helping to bring God’s kingdom to light.  These people are part of the Church to this very day, part of the “communion of saints” that we proclaim our belief in every Sunday.  And the Church has officially recognized some of these people as “big S” saints.  To ignore their stories, to ignore their friendship, is to walk Jesus’ way with legs shackled, arms tied to our side, and dark glasses clouding our sight.  I guess it’s possible, but I’d rather not.

There are thousands of saints that the Church recognizes by name.  Of course, the Church doesn’t “make” saints – only God can do that.  However, for the past thousand years or so, the Church has “canonized” certain people who were believed to have led holy and virtuous lives.  Before then, saints were declared by acclamation, generally by those people around whom the saint lived out his or her life here on earth.  Of course, these named saints are only a tiny fraction of those whom we presume are in heaven.

The fascinating thing about saints is that they come from all walks of life and from all parts of the world.  There are saints from privileged backgrounds like St. Thomas More, chancellor to King Henry VIII or England and St. Katherine Drexel.  There are saints from very humble backgrounds like St. Isidore the Farmer and many of Jesus’ first disciples, poor fishermen from the dusty backwater of Galilee.  There are saints from Africa like St. Charles Lwanga and our diocese’s own patron, St. Augustine of Hippo, saints from North America like St. Kateri Tekakwitha and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, and saints from Japan like St. Paul Miki.

The thousands of saints all have their unique stories and there is bound to be a saint who experiences may match quite closely with your own.  And this leads us to a second benefit we gain from our veneration of the saints.  The saints not only model Christian living for us, but also become prayer partners with us in our times of need.  Again, some have claimed that Catholics, in praying to saints, are blaspheming God.  But we don’t pray to the saints in the sense that they are replacements or surrogates for God, we pray with the saints just as we pray with our friends and our neighbors at Mass.  We pray with the saints just as St. Paul prayed with his disciples, just as he asked them to pray with and for him. 

Some saints are patrons of certain causes, perhaps due to some characteristic in their own lives, the manner in which they died, some trouble they may have endured, or some feat they may have accomplished.  That patron saint may be a particularly apt prayer partner when faced with particular situations or challenges.

For example, St. Anthony of Padua was once teaching about the Psalms at a monastery.  Now, Anthony had a hand-copied psalter that he used in his teaching.  Anthony lived in the early twelfth century, long before the printing press, so books like this were very scarce and almost impossible to replace.  One of the monks in the monastery recognized the value in this book and stole it and ran off.  There was much consternation but Anthony seemed rather sanguine about the affair.  He simply prayed for the monk.  Soon after, the monk came to his senses and returned to the monastery, restoring Anthony’s precious book to him and seeking his forgiveness.  Today, we call on St. Anthony to pray with us that we might find some lost object as dear to us as Anthony’s psalter was to him.

Study the saints, pray with the saints, for each of us by our baptisms are called to holiness, called to be saints in this life and in the next.  What better way to learn what we are called to do than to know the stories of those who have already done it.  What better friends can we have to help us on the way than those who have tread the path ahead of us? 

All holy men and women, pray for us.