Saints of the Jubilee

Nothing is more foreign to contemporary culture than the very idea of a saint. The world will occasionally acknowledge the humanitarian services of a figure such as Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but only if she is repackaged as something like a super-sized social worker first. For many of us – including, alas, many Catholics – saints exist in a mythical realm, distant in time and space, the heroes and heroines of a world long dead and gone.

Two main obstacles hinder our ability to recognize saints. First, we have a mistaken idea that Christian teaching requires everyone to follow a single, narrow path. The way to eternal life is a straight gate, as Jesus himself reminds us. But anyone who looks into the lives of the saints over twenty Christian centuries will immediately notice not their sameness, but their variety. Though all of them believe in the dogmas of the Church and strive to practice Christian charity and the standard moral virtues, something in the very nature of holiness makes present to the world a living and unpredictable spirit. There is no other way to account for the unique Christian vocations of saints as different as Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola, Theresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux, among many others.

But even if we get beyond a stunted notion of who saints are, we face a second obstacle. We are quite willing to believe that certain people have done good things and lived basically admirable lives. But can we really say that their time on earth offers an example of holiness? The very idea of holiness carries with it things most of us would rather not face: that some people are better than others, that certain acts are good and others are bad, and, last but not least, that there is a final standard of truth and goodness by which we will all be measured.

Oddly, the saints themselves are the ones who are most conscious of not living up to these traditional Christian standards. When Francis of Assisi tells his followers, "Let us begin again, for as yet we have done nothing," he is not merely setting impossible goals or indulging in a dangerous perfectionism. He is more acutely aware than the rest of us – precisely because of his own spiritual progress – how far we are from anything that might be called true holiness.

And that is only one of many reasons why the lives of the saints are an important and neglected resource in our world. We can look to the saints as examples of how a truly Christian life can be lived in a variety of circumstances. All sorts of controversies exist about theological, philosophical, and social questions. And the lives of the saints inevitably get drawn into these controversies. But saints – as these are certified by the authority of the Church – give us a kind of touchstone over and above all controversies. And remind us that holiness manages to take new and unforeseen forms in order to deal with the many problems in which we are embroiled.

The modern saints, which have been a special interest of Pope John Paul II’s, are especially helpful in this. Strictly speaking, we do not merely imitate saints the way we might imitate a well-known teacher or artist or public figure. The Church has always taught that we are in communion with the saints in the Body of Christ, which is the Church itself spread out through the ages. We still participate in the faith of Peter and Paul, Martha and Mary, and all the saints and martyrs. But there is no denying that the modern saints have special relevance to us because they frequently deal with problems quite close to those we encounter every day.

The present volume usefully selects a variety of modern saints canonized during the Jubilee. It could easily be much longer. But the figures treated here are representative of the many kinds of heroic witnesses that the faith still produces and the kinds of problems and opposition they face. People who have received special revelations, such as the three children of Fatima or Saint Faustina Kowalska, correspond most closely to what many expect saints to be. Though all of them were from quite humble backgrounds, they were given special communications that no one could have anticipated. The children at Fatima – still a tiny, out-of-the-way village almost a century after their visions – were entrusted with messages that seem much too large for the recipients. What could these very young peasant children have known, for instance, about the coming persecutions in Russia, which were revealed to them before the Communist Revolution had even occurred? Or how could a poor, barely educated Polish woman have conceived of a new devotion to the Divine Mercy and made it current against all human odds? The answer probably lies in the fact that like a poor carpenter’s son from an out-of-the-way village in Northern Palestine, the power of what they had to say has little to do with power as the world judges things.

But such special revelations are rare. Some saints, particularly the martyrs, remind us of the more typical need for heroic virtue in our time and the violent reaction to the encounter with the Good News that has occurred since the origins of Christianity. The Chinese martyrs described here, for instance, were the victims of various waves of repression. Often these deaths are excused today, even within Christian circles, as resulting from the Church’s participation in Western imperialism. Sometimes Christians did identify themselves too closely with Western cultures as they went out to preach the Gospel, and Pope John Paul II has apologized for those abuses. But as many of the examples collected here illustrate, missionaries have also been a courageous force of liberation where local governments attempted to keep their peoples in political and intellectual bondage.

We see this most clearly in the present volume in the Martyrs of Nowogrodek, simple missionaries of mercy in a non-Catholic area of Eastern Europe raked by the twin scourges of Nazism and Communism. These nuns did not convert the local population but won them over by their good-natured assistance to all who needed it, including their prayers to suffer in place of the Christians and Jews with families who were the targets of Nazi Germany’s murderous racial theories. Their prayers were answered; they ended up in a common mass grave, murdered for no reason other than they offered a different vision than the one that arrived by military conquest.

A similar case worked itself out in Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century where a revolutionary regime claiming to want to improve the lives of ordinary Mexican people believed it could only do so by persecuting the Church that almost all Mexicans belonged to – and have heroically adhered to to this day. Mexico’s continuing enthusiasm for the faith probably owes no small debt to the many witnesses who died so that their fellow Mexicans could live as Christians.