Inspiration from the Saints, page 2
The lives of the saints (which I had started to read about, since I had discovered faith) were the ultimate example of all the things I had been craving—specialness, and purity, and vividness. In the words of St. Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei, the saints had “transformed the prose of life into poetry.” The saints were human beings who had been transformed by Jesus Christ, who had been transformed into images of Christ. Their lives were completely dedicated to one goal—to live out the gospel. The whiteness of their robes, in the passage from the Book of Revelation, symbolized purity—the kind of purity, the kind of consistency that I looked for in grown-ups when I was a child. Just as Santa Claus was the embodiment of Christmas, and just as the Grim Reaper was the embodiment of death, the saints were the embodiment of the Gospel—living images of Jesus Christ.
And just as All Saints’ Day had always lain behind Halloween, without my even realizing it, the idea of sanctity lay unsuspected behind all the worldly images of success and glory and adventure that my society offered me. The superstar, the millionaire, the artist, the rebel—these were all faint images of true success, true wealth, true courage. Underneath all the dramas of life lay the ultimate drama of the quest for holiness.
I have been drawing inspiration from the lives and words of the saints for years now, and this book is my attempt to share some of that inspiration.
As I have said, it is a very personal book. It is by no means an academic treatise, a comprehensive survey, or a reference book. It is, rather, the sort of book about the saints that I have long been looking for myself.
There are many excellent reference books dedicated to the saints, full of dates and details and facts. I must admit that I find them rather dry reading. In reading about the saints, I look instead for human interest—stories, anecdotes, glimpses into their souls. Inspiration from the Saints looks at its subject through a series of themes—themes such as childhood, humility, marriage, the Eucharist, and prayer. My focus is more upon modern saints than ancient or medieval saints—simply because I find it easier to relate to them, and because I think today’s Catholics may also find it easier to relate to them. However, I do look at some ancient and medieval saints.
Although I have tried to write for a general audience, the book is inevitably written from a particular perspective—that of an Irishman born in the late twentieth century. Growing up in the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties, I just barely caught the sunset years of “Catholic Ireland”—a time when most people in Ireland went to Mass, when bishops and priests were treated with great respect by the media, and when open attacks on Catholicism were very rare. The situation is now completely transformed—the Irish media, Irish politicians, and Irish entertainment figures routinely castigate the Catholic Church. Ireland became the first country to introduce same-sex “marriage” by popular referendum in 2015, and there are powerful campaigns to drive the Church out of education and to remove Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion. Despite this, however, Catholicism remains an everyday presence in Ireland—almost eighty percent of Irish people describe themselves as Catholic, Catholic chapels are to be found in hospitals, airports, and shopping centers, and a huge number of streets, schools, and even private houses are named after Catholic saints.
I am using the term “saints” quite strictly—I will concern myself in this book only with people whom the Catholic Church has officially canonized or beatified.
As many of my readers will know, canonization is the act by which the Catholic Church declares a deceased person a saint. Beatification is the act by which the Church confers the title “Blessed” on somebody—which is the second-to-last stage in becoming a saint. In modern times, both of these processes are painstaking and can take decades. Let me explain them a little further. When a person is beatified, the Church has confirmed that person is in Heaven. When a person is canonized, the Church is telling Catholics all over the world that this is a person they may venerate, and take as a model of holiness. A beatified person is given the title “Blessed”—Blessed John Henry Newman, for instance. A canonized person is given the title “Saint” (St. for short)—St. John Paul II, for instance. The word “beatus” is sometimes used for a beatified person. For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to people who have reached either of these stages as “saints.”
“‘Servant of God” and “Venerable” are earlier stages on the road to possible canonization. “Servant of God” simply means that the Church is investigating that person’s cause for sainthood. (This is the case with my favorite author of all time, G.K. Chesterton.) “Venerable” means that the Church has investigated a person’s life and found that he or she lived a life of heroic virtue. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the famous Catholic televangelist of the twentieth century, has attained the title of “Venerable.” I have often been disappointed by books that profess to be about the saints, but which include many figures who have not even been beatified yet. For instance, I don’t doubt that my beloved G.K. Chesterton is a bona fide saint. I am not, however, going to preempt the Church’s decision on that score.
This book doesn’t focus very much upon miracles or supernatural visions, except as far as they relate to the themes I have chosen. Such wonders are the extraordinary gifts of God, which most Christians will never experience. However, we can and should seek to emulate the saints in the way they lived their lives, and this is what I concentrate on.
While I expect that most people who read this book will be practicing Catholics, my goal is to make it accessible to non-Catholics, non-Christians and those who may be feeling their way to faith. To cater to these readers, I will explain some basic Catholic concepts as I go along—I hope that experienced Catholic readers will not become impatient with me for this. Those who are steeped in their faith can sometimes forget just how secularized society has become, and that even intelligent, well-read people often now have very little knowledge of Catholicism.
I started this introduction with a memory of a Halloween long ago, one in which I became enthralled with the idea of one night that was dedicated to a particular atmosphere, a particular idea. I found myself craving times and places that were dedicated, that were special, in a similar way. And I even wanted people to be similarly dedicated, similarly consecrated to a particular ideal or philosophy. This is what I found in the saints, who are completely dedicated to Jesus Christ.
The name “Christ” actually means “the anointed one.” The anointing to which it refers is the holy anointing oil with which the priests and kings of Israel were made holy—the word holy meaning “set apart.” Christ was utterly dedicated to his mission—“My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to accomplish His work” (John 4:34). Similarly, the saints were utterly dedicated to following Christ. “For me to live is Christ,” St. Paul writes in the New Testament (Philippians 1:21).
The lives of the saints are all about Christ. How they lived that out is the subject of this book, one possible book out of the endless number that could be written: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books” (John 21:25). I hope these stories and quotations inspire you, as they have inspired me.
Childhood
The visionaries of Fatima • St. Aloysius Gonzaga
Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich • St. John Berchmans
St. Miguel Pro • St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
The very existence of childhood is one of the facts (one of the many, many facts) which hint at the existence of a God. Obviously, the human race had to have some way of reproducing itself, or the species would have disappeared long ago. But one can’t help seeing the artistry of Providence behind the particular way that it was done.
Childhood is far more than just the period of immaturity that humans go through on their way to adulthood. Imagine if there was some kind of injection that would speed up the process, and that would send us from being a newborn baby to being a fully-grown human in some radically shortened period—a day, or a week, or a month. Let’s further suppose that this had no baneful side-effects, and that the adult who thus mushroomed into maturity would be psychologically and emotionally healthy. It still sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it?
Childhood is so much more than a developmental stage. As well as undeveloped bodies and minds, children have assets of their own—wonder, and innocence, and a power of imagination that is the flip side of credulity.
Yes, children hate hearing the assertion that “these are the best years of your life.” Who wouldn’t? Indeed, it isn’t always true—some people have terrible childhoods. But it’s certainly true that the joys and pains of childhood are, in many ways, more vivid than anything that comes after. The Halloween party I described earlier is an example of how experiences from childhood—often very simple experiences—can influence our whole outlook and careers as adults.
Of course, it is all too easy to be sentimental about childhood. Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s classic novel about a group of boys stranded on an island without adults, is a very convincing depiction of the savagery that might easily break out in such a situation. We can probably all remember acts of cruelty and spite in our childhoods which shock us when we look back on them as adults. School playgrounds, in particular, can be ruthless places. Those who criticize the Christian doctrine of original sin (very often with words such as “Are you really saying that a little baby is born with sin?”) often fail to take this into account. Indeed, Sir John Betjeman’s poem “Original Sin on the Sussex Coast,” which describes an episode of childhood bullying, explicitly insists on the presence of evil in childhood—“the devil walks” in such incidents, Betjeman writes.
And yet Jesus himself told us that we should imitate children: “Unless you be converted and become like little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 18:3). In the next verse we are told that it is the humility of children which we are to emulate. Children are well aware of their own littleness. Their complete trust in their parents is the sort of radical trust we should all show in God.
There are many child saints, most of whom were martyrs. Two exceptional cases—child saints who were not martyrs, that is—are Jacinta and Francisco Marto, two of the three visionaries to whom Our Blessed Lady revealed herself at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. A year later, Jacinta and Francisco died in the great flu epidemic that swept through the world after World War One. The cause for their sainthood was ground-breaking, as the Vatican had recently ruled that such causes should not be investigated. Children, it had been decided, were too young to understand the concept of heroic virtue, never mind pursue it. A campaign which was supported by hundreds of bishops led Pope John Paul II to revoke this ruling, and in 2000 the same Pope beatified Juanita and Francisco. In 2017, they were declared saints by Pope Francis.
The facts of Fatima are well known. Three shepherd children (Jacinta, Francisco, and Lucia) experienced six apparitions of the Blessed Virgin, during which they were told to pray the Rosary every day and to perform penances. They were also shown a terrifying vision of Hell, and promised a miracle “so that all will believe.” The miracle, which duly occurred on October 13, 1917, was witnessed by tens of thousands of onlookers. The sun was seen to dance in the sky, not only by those who had gathered on the spot where the children had been having their visions of Our Lady, but many miles away. It is undoubtedly the most spectacular miracle of modern times.
The holy lives of the three children of Fatima testify that the miraculous apparitions they witnessed were truly of God. Before the apparitions, they had been ordinary, if pious, children. (They hurried through the rosary as quickly as possible, simply saying “Hail Mary” for each bead, so they would have more time to play!)
After the apparitions, they dedicated their lives to prayer and penance—Lucia until the impressive age of ninety-seven, Jacinta and Francisco until their deaths at the ages of nine and ten. Indeed, Sister Lucia, when writing about the children many years later, remarked: “Jacinta took this matter of making sacrifices for the conversion of sinners so much to heart, that she never let a single opportunity escape her.”1 Even on her deathbed, suffering from thirst, she refused to drink, as she wanted to offer penance right to her last moments. (This desire to share Christ’s thirst on the Cross, in the last moments of life, is quite common amongst the saints.)
This anecdote, taken from Fatima in Lucia’s Own Words, shows what a dedication to penance and charity the children had developed:
There were two families in Moita whose children used to go round begging from door to door. We met them one day, as we were going along with our sheep. As soon as she saw them, Jacinta said to us:
“Let’s give our lunch to those poor children, for the conversion of sinners.”
And she ran to take it to them. That afternoon, she told me she was hungry. There were holm-oaks and oak trees nearby. The acorns were still quite green. However, I told her we could eat them.
Francisco climbed up a holm-oak to fill his pockets, but Jacinta remembered that we could eat the ones on the oak trees instead, and thus make a sacrifice by eating the bitter kind. So it was there, that afternoon, that we enjoyed this delicious repast! Jacinta made this one of her usual sacrifices, and often picked the acorns off the oaks or the olives off the trees. One day I said to her:
“Jacinta, don’t eat that; it’s too bitter!”
“But it’s because it’s bitter that I’m eating it, for the conversion of sinners.”2
It’s true that these children had gone through an experience the like of which is vouchsafed only to a tiny minority of the human race. But they were still children, and they still lived lives of heroic virtue. The desire for holiness was something urgent and immediate to them, not a vague aspiration. Seeing this in the lives of these children impresses on the rest of us, not only the reality of holiness, but the fact that holiness is achievable—even little children like these could attain it. Can adults really claim that it is beyond their reach?
The story of the lives of the Fatima children also emphasizes the fact that they understood ideas such as sin, holiness and penance, and that these are not complicated ideas. True, vast volumes of moral theology have been written on these matters, and these are of much value—the truths of the Christian faith are no less deep, no less amenable to analysis, than the truths of science and history and other fields of human knowledge.
But there is a temptation to take an excessively sophisticated approach to Christianity, one which all too often means that our faith becomes whatever we want it to be—people who suffer from this tend to dismiss unquestioning piety as “literal-minded” and “simplistic.” Faith becomes a matter of seminars, retreats, lectures, insights, erudition. With this approach, we teeter towards gnosticism, the age-old heresy which takes innumerable forms, but which always promises enlightenment through some kind of advanced knowledge.
Against this, how refreshing is the story of these shepherd children giving up their lunches and making innumerable other sacrifices, prostrating themselves in prayer so that their heads touched the ground (as an angel had shown them to), and—in the case of Jacinta and Francisco—meeting their early deaths with such bravery! Please notice, as well, St. Jacinta’s insistence on penance for the conversion of sinners. There was an evangelistic and soul-saving dimension to the children’s sacrifices. They wanted not only to seek God, but to lead others to God—the Christian God.
The Fatima visionaries: St. Jacinta, Lucia, and St. Francisco
The idea has grown up in our modern society that sainthood is simply a matter of moral excellence, moral perfection. But Christian sainthood (and Christian life in general) must be concerned with the salvation of souls and the spread of the Gospel if it is to be Christian at all. This is a theme we will meet again and again in the lives of the saints. Their charity was not simple philanthropy, but always had a supernatural aspect to it.
Even looking at the pictures of the three Fatima visionaries strikes one with a certainty of their holiness and their authenticity. Their faces are filled with the simplicity and directness of childhood, and also with that elusive characteristic called sanctity.
But it isn’t only child-saints who have lived holy childhoods. In fact, it is surprisingly common for saints to have been outstandingly pious from an early age. Take the example of St. Aloysius Gonzaga. The son of the Marquis of Castiglione in Italy, he became a Jesuit, and died in 1591 at the age of twenty-three, after heroically caring for the victims of an epidemic. Legend has it that St. Aloysius’s first words were “Jesus” and “Mary.” (This is a tradition we encounter in the lives of many saints, but that is not to say that it is not true.) He took a private vow of perpetual virginity at the age of nine, having been so moved by a particular passage in a book about the Virgin Mary that he felt the urge to do some special thing to please her. At ten he vowed never to offend God by sinning—a vow that St. Robert Bellarmine (a contemporary of St. Gonzaga’s and a future Doctor of the Church), who heard Aloysius’s confessions, judged him to have kept. So comparatively sinless was Aloysius that two minor trespasses as a child—letting off a cannon without permission, and repeating some bad language picked up from soldiers without even understanding it—weighed on him for the rest of his days. He would mention these as examples of his bad behavior all through his life, to convince others that he was not as saintly as he seemed.
Even as a child, Aloysius fasted three days a week on bread and water, made shrines and altars as a hobby, and would hide himself in corners of the house so that he could pray uninterrupted. And he had such a devotion to his vow of chastity that he avoided so much as looking at women—indeed, he even avoided being alone with his own mother. (Given that she was the initial source of piety in his life—she wished him to be a priest, but his soldier father opposed it—one might wonder if she felt any indignation at his taking his piety this far!) Servants would peep through the chinks in St. Aloysius’s door to see him lying before his crucifix, for hours at a time, praying with his arms outstretched. He was also heard saying a Hail Mary at every step, when walking upstairs or downstairs. And he delighted in reading about the lives of the saints—this, too, is something we encounter again and again in the stories of saints.
