Denver Catholic

18 NOVEMBER 14-27, 2015 | DENVER CATHOLIC Perspectives The saints and all of us R OME. Amidst all the Sturm und Drang of Synod-2015, something genuinely new in the life of the Church began, and it shouldn't escape our notice. For the fi rst time in two millennia, an entry in the liturgi- cal books will now read, on the appropriate day, "Saints Louis and Zélie Martin, Spouses" – a happy addition to "Martyr," "Confessor," "Bishop," "Religious," "Pope," etc, in the pantheon of vocations to sanctity. Spouses: a married couple, together on the tapestry that hung from the central loggia of St. Peter's before, during, and after their canonization on October 18; a man and a woman, a dad and a mom, who were the parents of a saint, the Little Flower, and in whose married life mutual sanctifi cation took place by cooperation with God's grace. Saints-as-spouses. There was some- thing for Synod-2015 to ponder. And if insu' cient attention was paid to this during the Synod, that's no reason for the Church, in which millions of spouses are living lives of heroic virtue, not to take notice – and to refl ect upon some old truths about the "canoniza- tion" of saints. The Church doesn't canonize saints for their sake. God takes quite good care of his holy ones, we may be sure, and being "raised to the dignity of the altars," as the old phrase had it, does nothing for those so raised. No, the Church canonizes saints for our sake, so that we might have models who inspire us to be the holy ones we must be, if we're to fulfi ll our Christian and human destiny. That's why the Church sings the Litany of the Saints at its most solemn liturgical celebrations: the Litany of the Saints is the Church's family album, the roster of those who form that "great cloud of witnesses" of which the author of the Letter to the Hebrews speaks so eloquently. Another old truth worth repeating, with the holy spouses of the Martin family in mind, is that the Church doesn't "make saints;" God makes saints, and the task of the Church, through the beatifi cation and canon- ization process, is to recognize the saints that God has made. The process by which that recognition takes place has changed over time, from some- thing resembling an adversarial legal procedure to something more akin to a doctoral seminar in history. The object of the exercise remains the same, though: to sift through the record of a life in order to fi nd the traces and tracks of grace at work – as it is in all of us. The lives of the holy spouses of Lisieux are also a great witness to the incredible capacity of the Catholic Church for self-renewal. Louis Martin was born in 1823; Zélie was born eight years later. In other words, both were born a generation after the utter devastation of the French Church by the French Revolution. After the enforcement by state power of the Religion of Reason and the bloody slaughters of the Reign of Terror (a spasm of lethal Gallic craziness musi- cally evoked by Francois Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites), who would have predicted that 19 th -century France would be a seedbed of mission and sanctity, the ež ects of which would be felt from the hitherto-obscure village of Lourdes in the French Pyrenees to Francophone Africa to Oceania? Yet it happened. Much of what we think of as "French Catholicism" today grew out from under the rubble of the Terror and the destruction of the Church of the ancien régime. Louis and Zélie Martin, and their daughter, the Doctor of the Church who gave Catholicism the "Little Way," were all products of that astonishing fl ourishing of holiness and evangelical zeal that followed immediately after a period of unprecedented destruction. How did that happen? It happened because, life by life, men and women took the risk of fi delity. Ordinary people defi ed the claims of their putative ecclesiastical betters – too often heard during Synod- 2015 – that asking the heroic is just too much. No, it's not. Summoning us to lives of heroic virtue is asking us to be the saints we – like Saints Louis and Zélie Martin, Spouses – were baptized to be. George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. The Catholic Di¡ erence GEORGE WEIGEL Sinners among us L ike a lot of Catholics, every October growing up I was assigned a project related to the saints in preparation for All Saints' Day. I listened to friends speak with excitement about the saint they'd chosen to study, often referring to their "patron saint" – one they felt a sacred bond with. While I went through the motions every year, I don't ever remember feeling such a connection. As a kid I didn't really relate to the saints; they seemed like spiritual superheroes who were more like cartoon characters than human beings. As an adult, I simply found them too holy for the likes of me. After all, I struggle daily to live out the Gospel and to follow God's Will for me, and these were people who struck me as living their lives as the faithful big-guns of moral and theological virtue. But then I met the St. Augustine. Talk about hitting the reset button. This central fi gure in Christianity was a giant in loose living. Stealing, drunk- enness, having a child out of wedlock, participating in a heretical sect, and engaging with mistresses are some of the things that mark Augustine's journey into sainthood. A few years ago someone suggested I read his Confessions, Augustine's autobiograph- ical work. In it, he candidly details his struggle with sin and regret. He writes that during his sinful period he prayed to God, "Give me chastity and conti- nence, but not yet." But not yet. And there it was. This saint from the 4th Century and I were connected in just three words. How many times had I, too, prayed for God to change me, later on. In those three words I saw myself: My fractional faithfulness. My partial trust. I bonded with St. Augustine in this common struggle: our unreadiness to change. Our fear to surrender. Augustine's struggle was aided by a moment of Grace. It came under a Fig tree. "Tolle Lege," he heard a nearby child sing, meaning "take and read." He opened a book of St. Paul's letters at random and came to Romans 13:13-14: "Let us conduct ourselves becom- ingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the fl esh, to gratify its desires." It was this moment of Grace that prompted Augustine's conversion, resulting in his Baptism. He later became a priest and bishop, founded a religious order, and was a giant in defending the faith. An active preacher and writer, his letters circulated throughout the world to address the problems of his day. In coming to know St. Augustine, I discovered that I hadn't connected with a saint before because I thought sainthood was just about holiness. But that's not it at all. Sainthood is about cooperating with God's Grace in spite of my sinfulness so that I can follow God's call to holiness. Today, St. Augustine is my model for this. When I struggle, I look to his courage and willingness and it gives me hope. I ask him to intercede for me. And it's his own words that ož er me the most practical assurance: "There is no saint without a past. There is no sinner without a future." Gina Warner, wife and mother of three, considers herself an everyday Catholic in the pew. View from the Pew GINA WARNER Saints Louis and Zélie Martin, Spouses. PHOTOS FROM WIKI COMMONS

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