Be a Saint
Lesson 11
Be a Saint
We must learn about, pray to, and imitate the saints so that we may become saints too.
Question 11
The Bible tells us Jesus is the one Mediator. Do we also need saints?
Thomas answers . . .
“Do not fail to imitate the lives of saintly and noble men.”
— Letter to Brother John on How to Study
Born (and Reborn) for Sainthood
When the young friar Brother John wrote to St. Thomas for advice on how to study effectively and train one’s mind to grasp the truth, among the simple maxims Thomas gave him was the one that is shown above. God gave every human being, and only human beings of all living species on earth, intellects through which we can obtain universal truths and wills through which we can apply moral truths in the daily acts of our lives. So, Brother John’s question on how to improve his intellectual powers was indeed a good one. Of course, the ultimate truth that we seek, with a capital T, is Truth Himself, or God, and the ultimate good we seek with a capital G is also God Himself, as Thomas made clear to us in chapter 1, when we examined our first and foundational life lesson.
Now, Thomas knew well that to achieve that ultimate goal, we are all, in fact, called to become saints. “Sanctity” means “holiness,” and we have been explicitly told regarding the gate of heaven that “nothing unclean shall enter it” (Rev. 21:27). Jesus made clear in His famous mountain sermon: “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). We must attain a pure holiness to see God, whether we attain a high state of holiness by our last days on earth, or through purging of venial sins in purgatory.
The men and women officially declared saints by the Church have all passed with highest honors our first life lesson, having entered the gate of heaven, through their heroic cooperation with the bountiful graces of God. They did not pull themselves to heaven by their own bootstraps. They knew that “unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God,” and further, “unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:3, 5). Being baptized into God’s Church and filled with God’s graces, the saints so conformed their intellects and wills to the truth and the goodness of God that they not only won the prize of heaven but also stand ready, willing, and able to help us cross that celestial finish line and join them.
Not every saint was a scholar, but every one of them gave his or her all to God in mind, body, and soul — and we would do well to imitate them. When the twentieth-century social-learning-theory psychologists, most prominently Albert Bandura, scientifically verified the power of social learning theory (also known as learning through imitation or “modeling”), especially through research on children, they were quantifying more precisely what has long been commonsense wisdom. We have all heard and grasped the implications of the saying “Do what I say, not what I do!” — not to mention “Monkey see, monkey do!” Many can probably think of examples of such monkey business they have seen in action, and some of you might even admit to having been the monkey, at least once!105
The Church has long known of this powerful principle too. Come to think of it, we started this book with one bit of advice that even predates the Church, coming from the Old Testament: “He who walks with wise men becomes wise” (Prov.13:20). The particular wise man I had in mind was St. Thomas Aquinas, and that wise man has advised us to walk with the saints, never failing to imitate them. Of course, we cannot imitate what we do not know, so if we are to live out this life lesson we must strive to make time to learn about the saints. Indeed, one of the great blessings of the Catholic Faith is that we are blessed with a vast multitude of saints who stand ready for our imitation. Countless books have been written about their saintly lives, and many saints have left us with the most remarkable books of their own.
Few practiced this imitation of the saints more eagerly and assiduously than St. Thomas. Listen to this papal testimony regarding Thomas’s love for the wisdom of the saintly theological teachers who came before him, and how it raised him to unparalleled heights:
Now far above all other Scholastic Doctors towers Thomas Aquinas, their master and prince. Cajetan says truly of him: “So great was his veneration for the ancient and sacred Doctors that he may be said to have gained a perfect understanding of them all.” Thomas gathered their doctrines like the scattered limbs of a body, and moulded them into a whole. He arranged them in so wonderful an order, and increased them with such great additions, that rightly and deservedly he is reckoned a singular safeguard and glory of the Catholic Church.106
To read the Summa Theologica and many other of Thomas’s great works, is to come across hundreds, no, many thousands, of citations from hundreds of great saints and dozens of Church Fathers and Church Doctors of the Eastern and Western Church. Indeed, thanks to modern computerized word-searching technology, one modern author notes that among various theologians cited in the Summa Theologica, St. Augustine takes home the gold, so to speak, with an astounding 3,156 references, St. Gregory the Great takes home the silver at 761, and the bronze goes to Dionysius at 607.107 It’s no wonder we’ve already come across all three of them many times within these pages! Thomas’s Catena Aurea (Golden Chain) on the Gospels weaves together verse-by-verse commentary from several dozen Latin and Greek Church Fathers.
Thomas was interested in the saints not only as guides to his philosophical and theological research, teaching, and writing, but as guides to his own spiritual life in pursuit of holiness. His friend Brother Reginald reports, for example, that Thomas always carried on his person relics of the early martyr St. Agnes of Rome, and once, when Reginald fell sick during one of their journeys, Thomas applied her relics to Reginald and prayed for her intercession. Reginald was cured, and Thomas began an annual feast for his students on St. Agnes’s feast day.108
Though our primary focus in this life lesson is on saints, I should not neglect to mention that Thomas advised Brother John to imitate the lives not only of saintly people but of “noble” people too. Thomas lived out this lesson exceedingly well. He also eagerly sought out the pearls and nuggets of truth and wisdom in the writings of those he knew did not possess the fullness of truth of the Catholic Church, thinkers such as the pagans Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Seneca, and others, the Jewish Maimonides, and the Arabs Averroes and Avicenna.109 Thomas cherished truths wherever they may be found, and indeed, this is a hallmark of the Catholic Church herself. Revelation fears no truths of reason, for there is only one truth. While some in his day complained that he was watering down the wine of faith with the water of human wisdom, Thomas replied that “those who use philosophical doctrine in sacred Scripture in such a way as to subject them to the service of the faith, do not mix water with wine, but change water into wine.”110
Sainthood Is for Sinners
The only man who lived completely without sin was the God-man, God Incarnate, Jesus Christ. The only woman who lived completely without sin, was, through the power and grace of God, the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Note well that this means that every other human saint was, like us, a sinner. Every other saint in the history of the Church on earth has had, like us, to strive to pulverize sin as he or she ascended the spiritual ladder toward God.
Now, some saints were indeed rather saintly, even from a tender age. We do not know of any truly serious sins in the life of our own Angelic Doctor, for example. We are told that he was always asking about God from about the time he learned how to talk. By the age of five, he was under the tutelage of the Benedictines at Monte Cassino. By the age of nineteen, he had joined the Dominican Order of Preachers. He was soon after kidnapped by his siblings in an attempt to get him to leave the order. When they sent a prostitute into his room, he chased her away with a blazing firebrand. Two angels visited him in his sleep and strengthened him in chastity that did not fail for the rest of his life. Indeed, the priest who heard Thomas’s last confession before his death at age forty-nine said that Thomas’s confessed sins were like those of an innocent child. Recall, too, Thomas’s devotion to the virgin St. Agnes, who, at the tender age of thirteen had the holy fortitude to accept the martyr’s crown.
Still, many, and perhaps most, of the saints of the Church were not nearly so angelic in their lives before they met Christ. The beloved St. Mary Magdalene who stood at the foot of the Cross and was the first to witness Christ’s Resurrection, had earlier been healed of seven demons (Mark 16:9; Luke 8:2). Christ ministered to sinners, to prostitutes and sinful tax collectors, showing how they, through Him, could conquer sin, and countless sinners have done so since his Death and Resurrection. St. Mary of Egypt (344–421), for example, had been a prostitute for seventeen years before she converted to Christ and went on to become a desert hermit and a patron saint for persons undergoing sexual temptations. Her contemporary, the great St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), had succumbed to sexual temptations of his own as a young man, having an illegitimate son with a concubine. Indeed, we find in his Confessions that at one time in his youth he had famously uttered in prayer: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
Many men and women have become great saints despite worse sins than sins of lust. Among the greatest of them all, St. Paul, before his dramatic conversion to Christ on the road to Damascus, was known as Saul, among the greatest persecutors of the early Christians, a man who was present at the stoning of St. Stephen, “consenting to his death” (Acts 8:1).
St. Patrick of Ireland (ca. 385–461), was born in Britain and carried to Ireland by Irish pirates before the age of sixteen. Though he was the son of a deacon, he reported that he did not take his Faith seriously until the almost seven years of his captivity, during which he learned to pray to God one hundred times per day and as many times at night. He, too, was subject to sin as a young man. As a middle-aged man and a bishop he wrote his own remarkable Confession, in which he lamented that a friend had reported him to Church authorities for a sin he confessed to him that he had committed as a youth before he converted to Christ, which lasted less than an hour, and was never repeated.111
Read almost any life of almost any saint, and you will see that he or she did indeed grapple with sin, oftentimes even after conversion to Christ, though they all made great strides in conquering sin through the graces of the Holy Spirit and the sacraments Christ gave us. We can follow their examples and do likewise.
Sins we must avoid regarding the saints and saintliness include the grave sin of presumption, whereby we presume either by overconfidence in our own ability to earn salvation without God’s help in attaining sanctity, or by presuming of God that He will grant us our salvation without effort to attain sanctity on our part, and it’s opposite extreme of despair, whereby we completely abandon our hope that God can help us become saintly and enjoy eternal bliss with Him in heaven.112
Heroically Virtuous Saints Think, Do, and Love
Thomas examines differences in the types of lives that Christian saints may be called to live. These primary callings are to the contemplative life, which focuses on the inward contemplation of truth, and the active life, which focuses on external actions and affairs in the world. “Accordingly, since certain men are especially intent on the contemplation of truth, while others are especially intent on external actions, it follows that man’s life is fittingly divided into active and contemplative” (II-II, 179, 1).
These categories derive from the very nature of the human intellectual soul. “The life of plants consists of nourishment and generation; the life of animals of sensation and movement; and the life of men in their understanding and acting according to reason” (II-II, 179, 1). God gave us the capacities to know truth and to act for good. We see this in the two main functions of our reasoning powers, by the workings of the speculative intellect, which contemplates truths and is perfected by the intellectual virtues of understanding, science, and reason; and by the workings of the practical intellect, which gets things done and is perfected by the virtues of art and prudence.
Thomas draws heavily on the writings of St. Gregory the Great in his comparisons and contrasts of the contemplative and active lives.113 In using an example from the Old Testament, Gregory wrote that Jacob’s wife Leah, who was “blear-eyed” (see Gen. 29:17), but fruitful “signifies the active life; which being occupied with work, sees less, and yet since it urges one’s neighbor both by word and example to its imitation begets a number of offspring of good deeds” (II-II, 182, 1, citing Gregory’s Homily on Ezekiel). Gregory notes further that, “the contemplative life gives beauty to the soul, wherefore it is signified by Rachel, of whom it is said (Gen. 29:17) that she was of a beautiful countenance.”
The most famous biblical example is that of Martha, representing the active life, and her sister, Mary, the contemplative. Jesus declared, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41–42). Here we see Christ’s acknowledgement of the value of contemplation. Gregory would say: “Great are the merits of the active life, but greater still those of the contemplative” (II-II, 182, 2). Thomas would note as well that the contemplative part will not be taken away since our eternal bliss will consist in the Beatific Vision of God.
The bottom-line Thomistic life lesson here is that God has called us all, like the saints, to contemplate the truth and to do the good. At the risk of oversimplification, I like to think of these tasks in plain and simple terms as thinking and doing. We are all called to think and do, though some saints are so accomplished and well known in one area or the other that we might classify them as thinkers or doers, thinkers including the great theologians such as our own Thomas, as well as famous mystics such as Sts. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, and doers, including many saints who founded orders, such as Sts. Benedict and Ignatius of Loyola.
The nineteenth-century French Catholic psychologist Henri Joly has noted another interesting distinction we can make among the saints. “Throughout the history of the Church, there would seem to have been two distinct classes of saints. There are saints who personify active love and tenderness and there are saints who personify energetic action and the spirit of eager propagandism.”114 Those energetic evangelistic souls personify our doers, while those known best for their active love and tenderness could well be described as lovers. This is why I find it handy and profitable to think of saints in the threefold scheme of thinkers, doers, and lovers.115 While all saints do all three, some are known best for one of those activities.
When Joly expanded on his two classes of saints, examples he gave included St. Dominic among what we are calling the doers, and St. Francis of Assisi as an exemplar lover. I first wrote about these classes of saints when writing about three Irish saints. St. Kevin of Glendalough, a hermit priest, abbot, and author, was the exemplar thinker; St. Patrick, the man from across the Irish sea who converted an entire nation, was the exemplar doer; and St. Brigid of Kildare, known most for intimate, interpersonal acts of hospitality, mercy, and kindness to the sick, to the poor, and even often to animals, was the exemplar lover.
As we examine saints from all times and all lands we can come up with all kinds of parallels. Let’s take France for one more example. The greatest of all saintly thinkers was born in Italy but did his greatest work as a writer and professor at the University of Paris. I refer, of course, to our own St. Thomas. Next, there are certainly few saintly doers who have outdone the accomplishments of a young French girl. Indeed, the great American humorist Mark Twain, sometimes critical of religion in his works, was so enamored with her that he wrote an acclaimed historical novel all about her — the “her” being “the Maid of Orleans,” St. Joan of Arc. And as for French saints known for loving, who can forget the lessons of the young lady who taught us all how to glorify God by throwing Him the flowers of the small, loving acts we perform every day. I refer, of course to “the Little Flower,” St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
The saints personify for us virtue in action. Indeed, in the words of Pope Benedict XIV: “For the canonization of a servant of God, it is sufficient that there be proof that he has practiced those virtues which occasion demanded, in an eminent and heroic degree, according to his condition in life, rank and circumstances.”116 To imitate the saints is to grow in all manner of virtues, indeed, the good Lord willing, “in an eminent and heroic degree.” Every saint, in his or her own way, lived out all of our life lessons, and is ready to help show us how. Time spent learning about the saints is time well spent, indeed.
Praying Like (and to) the Saints
Through the wonderful graces of God, we can also do much more than merely learn about the saints as we might learn about notable historical figures. We can also form relationships with them while on our way to joining them in heaven. We can show them honor by granting them the dulia that justice requires, as we learned in chapter 4. We can and should also pray to them to intercede with God for us. Christ is the only direct Mediator between man and God (1 Tim. 2:5), being both man and God, but He also established the Church, which gives us the saints who intercede for us in heaven. As St. John has told us, before the throne of God are “golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints” (Rev. 5:8). The saints in heaven experience the Beatific Vision of God. They need not petition God for anything for themselves. Their sweet-smelling petitionary prayers are for us, and we would be wise to ask them to offer such prayers on our behalf, as they most willingly do, and indeed, as God sometimes even answers in the form of miracles.
So then, we should pray regularly to the saints — to our favorite saints, to patron saints of our vocations or special interests, to saints of our nation or lands of our heritage, to saints of religious orders dear to our hearts, to saints we are named after and whose names we have chosen for Confirmation, and, if we suffer from physical or mental ailments, to the bevy of saints who have become patrons of the afflicted, from St. Peregrine Laziosi (1265–1345) for those suffering with cancer, to St. Dymphna (seventh century) for those suffering from depression or other mental illness, to St. Rita of Cascia (1381–1457), a patron saint of the lonely. We can also pray some of the many prayers composed by saints.
My small Latin Mass missalette includes, for example, traditional prayers from St. Ambrose and our own St. Thomas Aquinas to help prepare for Mass. Many prayers of the saints are of extraordinary beauty. In our previous chapter, we mentioned St. Thomas’s prayer that gave rise to the beautiful sung version of the “Panis Angelicus.” Other remarkably beautiful prayers include St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Sun.” There is another prayer that comes to mind, from the patron saint of Ireland, that I’d like to quote at some length, but I’ll do so in our next chapter. When you read it (and pray it) you’ll know why!
I’ll conclude this section by noting that not only have saints composed prayers of their own, but some have provided us with very interesting and powerful ways to pray, using various postures that truly honor God in mind, soul, and body. A noteworthy example is the Nine Ways of Prayer117 practiced by St. Dominic de Guzman (1170–1221), the founder of the Order of Preachers, which so captivated St. Thomas.
Saints of the Sacraments and the Holy Mass
The sacraments strengthened all the saints in the same ways they can strengthen us. Some saints are even known for their devotion to a particular sacrament. Take, for the most obvious example, St. John the Baptist! The designation of saints as “confessors” does not denote the sacrament of Penance or Confession, but rather, saints who boldly and publicly professed or confessed the Faith despite imprisonment or other hardships yet did not suffer martyrdom. Still, there are some saints who were priests who were indeed known as masters of the sacrament of Penance, whom people of their time sought out for their spiritual guidance. St. Thomas’s teacher, St. Albert the Great, was one example of a saint who preached the importance of Confession: “He is truly zealous for souls who by holy contemplation and fervent desire, by tears and prayers, by night-watchings and fasts, by preaching and hearing of confessions, by wise counsel, salutary correction, and other good works labors for the salvation of souls.”118 And among saints known for healing souls through hearing confessions for as many as twelve or more hours per day are St. John Vianney (1786-1859), St. Joseph Caffaso (1811–1860), St. Leopold Mandic (1866–1942), and St. Padre Pio (1887–1968).
Further, though all saints cherish the Eucharist, some are known to have experienced intense periods of mystical ecstasy after receiving Christ in Communion. St. Catherine of Siena, for example, experienced mystical visions and ecstasies in public lasting for several hours after receiving Communion, and she lived for long periods near the end of her life on the Eucharist alone. Another is St. Martin de Porres (1579–1639). Friends reported he would often seem to disappear after Holy Communion, only to be found seeking silence and solitude in a variety of hiding places in the priory, including in dank basements and even up on the roof. There, in ecstasy, he would contemplate the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ, who had given Himself to Him. Indeed, Martin himself never spoke of his ecstasies, and some biographers have opined that his superiors encouraged him not do so, lest he be suspected of heresy and brought before the Inquisition!
There is perhaps no other saint who has written about the sacrament of the Eucharist in a more lofty, penetrating, theological manner, and in a most beautiful, personally devout way as well, as our own St. Thomas Aquinas, both the Church’s ultimate authority on transubstantiation and the author of lyrical hymns such as “Adoro Te Devote, Latens Deitas” (Devoutly I Adore Thee, Hidden Deity). We will look at both in our last chapter, but for now, let’s draw our attention to the crucial role the saints play in the greatest of all prayers of the Church and the holiest of all rites that make up the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Please take just a moment to reflect: Can you think of examples of the presence of the saints in the rites of the Holy Mass? How many come to mind? Well, I don’t claim this list is exhaustive, but here are perhaps a surprising number of instances in both forms of the Mass:
A quick tour of the Mass like this one should be sufficient to show that saints form an integral part of our Faith. Indeed, Christ came that we might take up our crosses, follow Him, and join their number.
Life Lesson 11 Summa
Be a saint! We can reach no higher, and God expects no less of us. Though all of us are sinners, God has given us countless graces to help us rise above sin, all the way to heaven. Among those generous gifts are the examples and the intercessions of the Church Triumphant in heaven, that holy communion of saints of both sexes, all ages, and all regions of the earth. We must cast off the presumption that we do not need their aid and the despair that falsely claims that they cannot help us. May we be lifted up by their examples and inspired to display heroic virtues of our own in how we think, do, and love. May we pray to the saints for their intercession, pray like the saints in their holy love for God, and pray at times in the very words great saints have given us, especially as we gather together with each other, with them, and with the angels at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. May we pray, as the old spiritual hymn goes, that when the saints go marching in, we may be in their number.
105 When I would expand on the power of imitation to my developmental-psychology students, I described the first time I saw my toddler son get up on his tiptoes and carefully raise one leg high in the air to turn off the television set with his toes (an admirable, monkey-like feat of dexterity for a child of his age). I realized though, as soon as I saw him do it, that I was the big monkey he imitated, having many a night, before his eyes, carried his sleeping older brother to bed, and with hands occupied, turned off the TV with my toe, a feat requiring far less dexterity!
106 Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Aeterni Patris, On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy According to the Mind of St. Thomas Aquinas, The Angelic Doctor (August 4, 1879). (I aver that one of the main reasons these are such turbulent times is that too few modern thinkers have shown similar veneration and understanding for the doctrines of the Angelic Doctor, rendering the Church less safe for those within it and less glorious in the eyes of the world.)
107 Stephen Beale, “Which Church Fathers Most Influenced St. Thomas Aquinas?” National Catholic Register, February 8, 2018. http://www.ncregister.com/blog/sbeale/which-church-fathers-most-influenced-st.-thomas-aquinas
108 St. Agnes of Rome (291–304) is often depicted with a lamb since agnus means “lamb” in Latin. She was a virgin martyr, is one of seven women commemorated by name in the Traditional Canon of the Mass, and happens to be the namesake of my childhood church and grade school. For an insightful article on St. Thomas and St. Agnes, see Brother Joseph Martin Hagan, O.P., “The Lamb and the Dumb Ox,” Dominicana, January 21 (her feast day), 2016. https://www.dominicanajournal.org/the-lamb-and-the-dumb-ox/.
109 Aristotle clearly took home the gold in terms of numbers of citations. Not only did Thomas write line-by-line commentaries on several of Aristotle’s books, Aristotle, or “the Philosopher” is cited 2,095 times in the Summa Theologica (per Beale’s previously cited article)!
110 See section 2.3, ad. 5 in St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Boethius’ On the Trinity, St. Isidore Forum, https://isidore.co/aquinas/english/BoethiusDeTr.htm#L22.
111 We do not know the nature of that sin of his adolescence.
112 Despair and presumption have been traditionally listed among the sins against the Holy Spirit. They are addressed in sections on the virtue of hope in CCC 2091 and 2092.
113 Gregory was a fascinating example of a man who by inclination was a contemplative hermit, and yet who was called by God to the busy office of the papacy. So well did he pursue that active life that he became one of a handful of popes to be called “the Great,” and yet he lamented the loss of his contemplative bliss on heavenly things. “But now,” he wrote while pope, “by reason of my pastoral charge, my poor soul is enforced to endure the burden of secular men’s business, and after so sweet a kind of rest.” Edmund G. Gardner, ed., The Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great (Merchantville, N.J.: Evolution Publishing, 2010), 4.
114 Henri Joly, The Psychology of the Saints (Fort Collins, CO: Roman Catholic Books, n.d.), 50.
115 Note, too, that while the intellectual virtues are so crucial to thinkers, and the moral virtues to doers, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and, foremost, loving charity ring out most clearly in our lovers.
116 Benedict XIV, On the Beatification and Canonization of Saints 3:21 (as cited in Joly, The Psychology of the Saints, 25).
117 “Nine Ways of Prayer,” Dominicans of St. Cecilia, https://www.nashvilledominican.org/our-vowed-life/st-dominic/nine-ways-of-prayer/.
118 St. Albert the Great, cited in St. Albert’s College, ed., Saint Albertus Magnus (Racine, WI.; Saint Catherine’s Press, 1938), vii.
119 They are Peter and Paul (named together as joint founders of the Church), Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon and Thaddeus (Apostles); Linus, Cletus, Clement (all bishops of Rome ordained by Peter), Sixtus (Sixtus II, another early pope, whose deacon was St. Lawrence), Cornelius (an early martyred pope), Cyprian (martyred bishop of Carthage in North Africa), Lawrence (martyred deacon), Chrysogonus (martyred under Emperor Diocletian), John and Paul (martyred under Emperor Julian the Apostate), and Cosmas and Damian (twin physicians martyred under Diocletian whose remains are in Rome).