“The Saints are always a provocation to the conformism of our customs, which we often think are prudent simply because they are comfortable. The radicalism of the witness of these heroic figures is a jolt to our laziness and an invitation to discover certain forgotten values.”
Newsroom (06/11/2022 9:45 AM, Gaudium Press) In the church that I have attended since childhood, there are countless images of Saints – approximately fifteen.
They have always been the object of my attention.
At first, those emblematic figures seemed to me to be enormous people and were very interesting to me. Upon asking my elders, they told me the histories, summarized, of those mythical entities, and I was discovering their names: Joseph, Expedito, Francis, Rita of Cascia, Theresa…
Then they seemed to me to diminish in size, it is true, but also in sympathy. The postures and physiognomies of those characters, once fantastic, no longer satisfied the longings of the boy who had grown up. They looked like sad and naïve people, very naïve. St. Francis no longer seemed to like the doves that perched on him; and St. Thérèse could not even seem to carry her crucifix properly, which emerged from a disproportionate bouquet of flowers.
Are these the heroes of the Church? – I asked myself – do not soldiers who suffer in a war have more value than these “Saints”? Their lives are beautiful, but they seem surreal to me, like in a fairy tale?
In fact, the stories I heard were unreal. This was because most of those who told them ignored perhaps the most important aspects of the lives of the Saints: their sufferings and struggles.
And what was my surprise when I came across phrases written by a certain French Saint, the same Thérèse, or better, another one that I did not know yet: “What happiness I would have felt, for example, to fight at the time of the Crusades, or, later, to fight against heretics. Ah! I would not have been afraid of fire!”, and “I must die with my weapons in my hand, having in my mouth the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God”[2].
Around These Phrases Many Things Have Become Clear.
The heroes of the Church, the glorious Saints, did not come out of books of fables, nor were they the fruit of creative imaginations. Nor were they incorporeal beings incapable of suffering; still less were they romantic men and women who connived with evil.
Until They Arrived at Heroism.
I continued my research into the world of hagiography and, in a book entitled “The Saints, a Stone of Scandal”, I read the following passage: “The Saints of all times have never walked like winged Angels on clouds of glitter, but have had to cultivate their holiness day after day, step by step, amid difficulties and stumbles. They fell and rose again and again, among ravines and swamps; they wounded themselves – because they were men – against the rocks of human miseries and of their own defects and limitations; and they endured for love of God – because they were Saints – until they reached heroism, the dust that contemporaries raised around them, with their insults and calumnies.”
Out of Fashion
And why did their contemporaries surround them with insults and slanders?
“The way to be right about the future consists, at certain times, in knowing how to resign oneself to being out of fashion,” commented a French journalist on one occasion.
Now, these glorious figures were never “fashionable” in their time. Many had to go against the customs of their times to be glorified many decades or centuries later. St. Francis of Assisi is an example.
It is not in vain that G.K. Chesterton, in his biography of St. Thomas Aquinas, defends this formidable thesis: “The Saint is medicine because he is antidote. This is the reason why the Saint is so often martyred: he is taken as a poison because he is a triage. In general, it happens that he re-establishes the health of the world by exaggerating what the world despises: some element, which is by no means always the same in every age. Yet each generation seeks its Saint by instinct, not what it wants, but what it needs. (…) Hence the paradox of history, that each generation is converted by the Saint who is most at odds with it”.
This is precisely what Paul VI confirmed in his homily at the beatification of St. Beatriz da Silva: “The Saints are always a provocation to the conformism of our customs, which we often judge to be prudent simply because they are comfortable. The radicalism of the witness of these heroic figures is a jolt to our laziness and an invitation to discover certain forgotten values.”
There Was None Well Treated by the World
And again, St. Alphonsus de Liguori pointed out: “Whoever wishes to be glorified like the Saints must suffer on earth like the Saints, for none was treated well by the world; they were all persecuted and despised, and what the Apostle says was fulfilled in them: all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”
Today I breathe a sigh of relief as I contemplate those same images. But this is because, thank God, I can now recognize in St. Francis’ doves the peace he won for his soul by the war he waged against the world, the devil and the flesh: “si vis pacem para bellum”; and, behind St. Teresa’s roses, were the thorns of the countless sufferings she bore with the soul of a warrior.
Finally, today I can glimpse, behind the pious images, the monuments of pain, struggle and glory that rise above the mediocrity of our days, to proclaim the glories of a God Who transforms men and women of flesh and blood into lights that shine in the firmament of the Catholic Church for all eternity.
By Afonso Costa
Compiled by Sandra Chisholm
