Great Saints

My Call to Holiness class is giving me the opportunity to read saints whom I've never read before. Last week I read some of Catherine of Sienna's writings. Catherine was a remarkable 14th century lay woman who composed evocative prayers with phrases such as "and you, high eternal Trinity, acted as if you were drunk with love, infatuated with your creature.....you engrafted your divinity into the dead tree of our humanity". She wrote hundreds of letters with psychologically prescient wisdom to her peers, to clergy, and even to popes, ultimately brokering peace between the Pope and various opposing rulers which allowed the papacy to move back to the Vatican.

This week I'm reading St Francis  de Sales, a 17th century bishop of Geneva whose gentle pastoral manner is striking me and reminding me of my shortcomings which I constantly need to work on.

As we read through the history of saints we're looking at how holiness has been understood through the ages, and the shifts which have taken place, and continue to take place.

In the first Christian centuries martyrdom was the outstanding Christian virtue. Martyrs were assumed to have gone straight to heaven and were instantly acclaimed as saints. Once Christianity stopped being dangerous in the 4th century people seeking true holiness consisted in fleeing the world by going into the wilderness to live an ascetic life. Later this consolidated into monasteries with varying degrees of poverty, simplicity and penance, and monastic life become the driving force of Christianity for 800 years. In the 13th century St Francis and St Dominic led the charge out of monasteries and into the newly urbanised cities of Europe.

In the earlier centuries miracles were associated with holy people, and their biographies (hagiographies) are filled with extraordinary and frankly improbable wonders. But by the time we get to saints like Francis de Sales the focus is no longer on extraordinary visions and actions but on character and virtue which in Francis' case is well documented. These latter saints whose writings we have or whom much is written about can therefore be models for how we can strive for holiness in our time and place.