Inspiration from the Saints, page 3
The childhood of St. Aloysius may seem priggish, cold, and excessive in its piety to us. But let us remember the words of Oscar Wilde: “Nothing succeeds like excess.” The saints are remarkable for their heroic virtue, and the stories we remember and tell about them are usually about extraordinary feats.
Here is an example from modern, secular life which might help us to put the extravagances of St. Aloysius (and other saints) in perspective. F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, once had dinner with the Irish novelist James Joyce. At this time, Fitzgerald was a young man, and Joyce was internationally celebrated. The younger writer was so star-struck that he offered to jump out the window as an expression of his admiration. Joyce very sensibly forbade this, but the anecdote seems a good illustration of how extravagantly people behave under the influence of some strong devotion. The devotion that the saints felt to our Lord Jesus Christ manifested itself in much extravagant behavior, even (in many cases) in childhood. There’s really nothing very strange about this. It is a very human response.
Let us remember how Jesus reacted when a woman who had lived a sinful life (traditionally identified as St. Mary Magdalen) poured ointment over him and kissed his feet, during his visit to the house of Simon the leper. Far from chastising her, he defended her when she was chastised by others. In the same way, he defended those who threw palms in front of him and shouted as he entered Jerusalem. Our Lord obviously does not disapprove of extravagance in the right places, and for the right motives.
I could fill this entire book with instances of extravagant piety in the childhoods of the saints. Though there are many saints who were decided sinners in their early days, there are also a great number of saints who seem to have been saintly from their cradles. Here is a simple example, from the life of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, a German mystic who died in 1824, and whose visions of the life of Christ had an influence on the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ, which was such a massive success in 2004:
Anne Catherine Emmerich, when trying to practice her reading by the light of burning chips of wood, would choose chips from new planks, with which her father was mending a neighbor’s bench. When her father suggested old chips would make better firewood, she declined to use them because they were their neighbor’s property.3
There is a charming story from the life of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, foundress of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. As a young child in Italy, she would make paper boats and fill them with violets, imagining the violets were missionaries going abroad to win converts. At one point, however, she fell into the lake, thus developing a longstanding fear of deep water—a fear which she overcame when she brought her Order to serve the spiritual needs of Italian immigrants in America. Another story from her childhood has her family looking for her after an earthquake had hit their home. They found her lost in prayer, completely oblivious to what had happened.
A saint who was greatly influenced by St. Aloysius Gonzaga, and in fact took him as his model, was the Belgian St. John Berchmans. St. Berchmans was a Jesuit seminarian—that is, a young man who was training to be a priest in the Jesuit order—who died at the age of twenty-two, never living to make his final vows. He died in Rome while participating in a philosophical debate organized by the Dominicans. His sanctity was recognized immediately.
St. Berchmans was a saint even in childhood, as one biographer explains:
From his first years, the child foreshadowed the exceptional gifts which were to make him the model of a sanctity which is lovable and gracious. He was never any trouble to anyone. He bore, without crying, the little trials of his tender age; and attacks of sicknesses to which children are subject and which render the best of them irritable and hard to manage, never drew from him any sign of complaint. No oppositions ever elicited from him any sign of complaint. No opposition from him ever elicited any gesture of impatience. Sometimes when he came back home, it happened that he found the doors locked. The child then called to mind a house in which he was at home with his Father. He went into the church and recited his rosary.
St. John Berchmans
It was a recompense to John’s religious parents to see the spontaneous blossoming of the germs of piety which they had made it their study to plant in the soul of the child. Every morning he went to the parish church to assist at the Holy Sacrifice, and when, at the age of seven, he began to go to school, of his own accord he arose earlier so as not to go to class without having served two or three Masses.4
If all this gives the impression that all saints were perfect children, perhaps the reader will find some relief in stories that prove this is not so. St. Miguel Pro was a Jesuit who was martyred in 1927, during a persecution of the Catholic Church by an anti-Catholic Mexican government. His life is full of stories of dashing heroism—he was something of a priestly James Bond, constantly on the run from the authorities and often slipping right through their fingers. But he wasn’t above a little bit of naughtiness as a child:
Miguel’s thoughts dwelt often on tortillas—maize cakes capable of a wonderful diversity; he was in fact a fairly greedy little boy. Once all funds for the purchase of dulce, of sweets, had run out. There was a compliant [obliging] sweet merchant, but even he hesitated: “Have no fear,” said Miguel, his black eyes bravely encountering those of the doubtful sweet vendor. “Put it down to my mother.” The performance was repeated till the sum totaled up was respectable and the merchant sent in his bill...the Senora paid it, but so did her little boy, but with a difference. Miguel remembered the payment for some time in the body but always in the mind.5
The future saint also threw a tantrum when his beloved sisters decided to enter religious life:
Two of his sisters were going to enter convents, to be nuns. Miguel was astounded; no, he was outraged. His sisters, part of his family, to be torn away; the happy, good, life round the flowering patios, the peaceful, gay round of good works and family reunions, of quite legitimate amusements, the family prayers, the Sunday Masses with the two beloved charming girls in their high combs and mantillas, the walks by the fountain, the music-making, all this to end, at any rate for them, his dark-eyed sisters....
He went into the brushwoods and stayed there.... He was there for days, and then someone, his mother—as she would have done—found him. She got him to go home; alarmed no doubt at this outburst, this unbridled impetuosity, this rebellion, she talked to him, with her gentleness, her firmness. She wanted him—Miguel!—to go to make a retreat, that is to retire for a few days’ reflection and prayer into some religious house. It is a common enough procedure amongst Catholics, but it was the last thing Miguel wanted to do. In the end he went.6
Miguel went reluctantly to the retreat, but it set him on the road to sainthood and martyrdom. We will encounter him again later.
A recently canonized saint, St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, is an even more striking example of a holy person who was far from holy in childhood. This French mystic, who died as a Carmelite nun in 1906, had such a stubborn streak as a young girl, and was prone to such rages, that her mother told her “you will either be a terror, or a saint.” After her first confession she learned to control her temper, and, though she yearned to be a Carmelite nun from an early age, she patiently obeyed her mother’s request that she wait until the age of twenty-one. She died only five years later, of Addison’s disease (a disorder of the adrenal glands). Although she performed no remarkable feats in her short life, her personal holiness and her writings on mental prayer led Pope Francis to declare her a saint in October 2016.
I include these stories because, in their own way, they are as inspiring as the stories of St. Aloysius Gonzaga and the children of Fatima. The picture of little children completely dedicated to the worship of God shows us that such dedication is possible, even for children. As well, this image shows us that God is something that can satisfy our entire heart and soul, and do not most human beings yearn for such satisfaction? If we are tempted to think that we can never reach such heights—if we are tempted to think that our petty and selfish and wayward impulses are too strong, and too many—the stories of saints who have been far from saintly in childhood remind us that this is not so.
1 St. Lucia de Jesus dos Santos, Fatima in Lucia’s Own Words: Sister Lucia’s Memories (Fatima, Secretariado Dos Pastorinhos), www.pastorinhos.com/_wp/wp-content/uploads/MemoriasI_en.pdf, accessed 10 December, 2016.
2 Ibid.
3 Edith Renouf, Life of Catherine Emmerich (1950), 10.
4 Hippolyte Delehaye, St. John Berchmans (New York, Benziger Brothers, 1921), 18–19.
5 Mrs. George Norman, God’s Jester: The Story of the Life and Martyrdom of Fr. Michael Pro (New York, Benziger Brothers, 1930), 6–7.
6 Ibid., 10–11.
Sinners
St. Paul of Tarsus • St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Philip Howard • St. Bernard of Corleone
Blessed Bartolo Longo • Blessed Charles de Foucauld
Naughty children are one thing, but what about serious wrongdoing in adulthood? It’s reassuring to know that several people who fell deep into grave sin at some point in their lives eventually made the Church’s list of saints. “The greater the sinner, the greater the saint” is a well-known proverb on this topic; it seems to have originated in the eighteenth century with the Methodist preacher George Whitefield. So in itself, it doesn’t seem to be a sentiment that has any backing in the Catholic tradition.
However, the twentieth century Polish mystic St. Faustina—who was granted many private revelations—was told by Our Blessed Lord that “the greater the sinner, the greater the claim he has to my Mercy.” Catholics are not required to believe in private revelations (that is, revelations outside the public revelation of Scripture). However, given that Faustina is a saint, and that the Church celebrates Divine Mercy Sunday every year as a result of her private revelations, the revelations vouchsafed to her should surely carry considerable weight. Besides, the Bible itself says something very similar: “There will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent” (Luke 15:7).
Similarly, there is the New Testament story already mentioned, of the woman who poured perfume over Jesus’s feet in the house of Simon the leper, and who wet them with her tears and wiped them with her hair. In response to Simon’s (unspoken) thought that the woman was a notorious sinner, Jesus explains that those who have experienced greater forgiveness show greater love, as the woman’s lavish demonstration of love towards him proves. Traditionally, this woman was identified with St. Mary Magdalene, to whom the first post-Resurrection appearance of Jesus mentioned in the gospels was made. Today there seems to be no consensus on this matter.
St. Paul of Tarsus, whose letters to various early Christian churches form a large part of the New Testament, is another Biblical example of a notorious sinner turned saint. St. Paul was originally a Pharisee called Saul who energetically persecuted the early Christians. Indeed, we read of him guarding the cloaks of those who stoned St. Stephen, the first martyr, and he tells us himself in one of his letters that he approved of the stoning.
Of course, Saul had his famous vision of Our Lord on the road to Damascus, and from that moment went from being the most ardent persecutor of Christianity to being one of its most zealous disciples. As he wrote himself: “For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God” (1 Corinthians 15:9).
St. Augustine of Hippo, the greatest of the Fathers of the Church, is another famous sinner turned saint. He lived with a mistress for fifteen years, even having a son by her, before converting to Christianity and committing himself to a life of celibacy.
A saint who is less well known, but whose life makes a fascinating story, is St. Philip Howard of England (1557–1595). England at this time was a very dangerous place to be a Catholic, since the English Reformation had taken place and Catholicism was treated as treason. Although he was eventually to give his life for his faith—condemned to death, he was not actually executed, but died in prison—St. Philip had a far from holy life in his early days. He was an ambitious courtier, at a time when success at court meant flattering and pleasing the immensely vain Queen Elizabeth. He spent enormous sums in order to live the expensive life of a courtier, putting on entertainments for the Queen, as well as giving her gifts which include (to quote contemporary reports): “a girdle of tawny velvet embroidered with seed pearls, the buckle and pendant [made] of gold; a pair of bracelets of gold containing eight pieces in every of them an amethyst, and eight other pieces, and in every of them a pearl; a carcanet (necklace) of gold containing seven pieces of gold, six true loves of small sparks of diamonds, and many pearls of sundry bigness and small sparks of rubies.”1 In fact, he put himself into such debt, trying to gain the Queen’s favor, that he had to sell some of his land—and not only his own land, but that belonging to his wife. What makes this all the more remarkable is that his father had been executed by the same Queen for involvement in a plot against her.
St. Philip Howard
While Philip was living it up at court, he was also ignoring his wife, to whom he had been married since they were both fourteen. Eventually she went to live with his grandfather, the Earl of Arundel. Though he showed charity to the poor, his life was fundamentally one of self-seeking and frivolity.
It was listening to a debate between a Catholic and two Protestants that changed St. Philip’s life. The Catholic was another saint, St. Edmund Campion, who would eventually be martyred. He was a brilliant Jesuit who, at the time of the debates, was a prisoner and had already been tortured several times. Despite these conditions, he performed very well against his Protestant opponents. Philip Howard was in the audience for one of these debates, and was deeply impressed. Slowly, he began to be drawn to the Catholic faith, eventually being received into the Church. His sister and wife had already converted.
Catholicism was illegal in England at this time, and Philip—who had by this time inherited the title of Earl of Arundel (a title that had been thrown into question his by father’s execution)—was such a prominent person that he found it very difficult to hide his religious beliefs. His refusal to condemn his wife’s religion, and his reluctance to participate in non-Catholic religious services, threw suspicion on him. He was just about to leave England, so that he could practice his religion abroad, when he was arrested and imprisoned in the infamous Tower of London. He would stay there for the remaining ten years of his life, though he was promised freedom if he renounced his faith. On the wall of his cell, he wrote a Latin inscription which translates: “The more afflictions we endure for Christ in this world, the more glory we shall obtain with Christ in the next.”
The story of St. Philip Howard is especially inspiring because his transformation is so unexpected. Before his conversion, he was simply another courtier hanging around the court of Queen Elizabeth I, hoping to win the all-important favor of the Queen. His neglect of his wife is especially mean-spirited and unattractive—not even the kind of hot-blooded sin which might hint at great energies and passions within, the sort of personality of which saints are made. Furthermore, St. Philip would have been well aware that converting to Catholicism might have very bad consequences for him, in the England of the time. Everything in his life seemed to make the step he took most unlikely. His story seems that of a man who has become intellectually convinced that the Catholic faith is the truth, and chosen his path accordingly.
In more recent times, we have a saint who seriously wounded a man in a duel. Filippo Latini was a Sicilian of the seventeenth century who was famous for his skill with a sword, and was always quick to get into a fight. Despite this, he was quite pious, even begging for food on behalf of the poor. Nevertheless, Filippo’s enthusiasm for sword fighting led him to accept a challenge from one Vito Canino. Filippo inflicted a near-fatal wound on Canino, cutting off his arm, and hurried to a Capuchin Franciscan friary out of fear of revenge. (An appropriate haven, as it happened, as he already had quite a devotion to St. Francis.)
Although he was forgiven by the man he had attacked, the incident made Filippo take stock of his life, and he eventually joined the Capuchins as a lay brother (that is, a friar who is not ordained as a priest). He took the religious name Bernard, becoming known as Bernard of Corleone. His life after that was one of exemplary penance and sanctity—he slept on a plank bed, whipped himself regularly (a surprisingly common practice in the lives of the saints, used to gain control over the body and to repent for sins—we will discuss austerities and penance in another chapter), and was known for his gentleness and charity. He was illiterate, but when it was suggested to him that he should learn how to read and write, he said that the only thing he needed to study were the wounds of Christ. It was not until 2001 that he was made a saint, by John Paul II—he had been beatified more than two hundred years before, in 1768!
Even more spectacular than this is the case of Bartolo Longo, the former Satanist who was beatified. Really!
