Franciscan at Home

What do you think when you read the word “saint”? Do you imagine an icon of a placid martyr, like Ignatius of Antioch crawling with lions? Perhaps you think of a saint from your own living memory, like Pope St. John Paul II or St. Teresa of Calcutta. Or maybe you think of a living person you know who embodies sanctity and who might even one day have a place in the Roman canon. Words like “sin,” “failure,” and “redemption,” however, are probably not the first to come to mind when most of us think of the saints.

This is understandable, and it has been affected by historical circumstances that have shaped our writing about the saints through the centuries. We need and want good examples, and the stories of saints we have grown accustomed to are mostly positive tales of their virtue and accomplishments.

Let’s say your child has aspirations of becoming a great soccer player. What do you do? You go on YouTube and find highlight videos of Lionel Messi dribbling and shooting and say, “Look, if you practice, you could do that.” I know because I have done this. We generally don’t watch highlight reels of mistakes (lowlights?) or long, slow videos of improvement.

For a long time, this is what we have done with the majority of our presentations of the saints, as well. We love to talk about their incredible sanctity (“St. John Vianney only slept two hours a night because he heard so many confessions!”) or we focus on the saints who don’t have very visible stories of sin or conversion.[1] I have a deep love for saints such as Thérèse of Lisieux and John Paul the Great, but I sometimes find treatments of their lives difficult to relate to, as these stories give the impression that they never struggled with sin in the way that I do.

St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine of Hippo, is a good example of this treatment. As a scholar of the early Church who has read St. Augustine’s Confessions numerous times, I have slowly become aware of the flat and incomplete treatment we often give to St. Monica by focusing only on the one great aspect of sanctity for which she is most famous: intercession for her wayward son. It is understandable that we focus on this, particularly when there are people in our families who are far from God. Intercession for Augustine is St. Monica’s most prominent activity in the Confessions itself, as Augustine wanted to clearly depict the means that God used to bring him to conversion.

However, Monica is a more complex figure than simply the “Mother of Tears” who prayed her son into the Church. Long before the blessed death of his mother related by Augustine in book 9 of the Confessions, he gives us several glimpses into parts of Monica’s life that needed redemption. By examining three of these and seeing how God’s grace was operative in each situation, my hope is to demonstrate how saints like Monica can be examples to us of the redemptive power of God in normal circumstances and not just examples of truly exceptional sanctity.[2] I will examine them in the order in which Augustine describes them in the Confessions, which is not chronological.

When you think of what it means to “pray like the saints,” what image comes to mind? In our Catholic faith, we have been blessed with a rich heritage of spiritual practices and prayer techniques to help us grow closer to our Lord. In this article, we’ll be looking at a specific prayer method that many might consider odd or morbid at first. It is, however, a meditative method that is filled with many graces and engages both the mind as well as the heart. I am speaking of the practice of meditating upon death, or memento mori.

It may surprise us to learn that this practice is one that has found strong advocates in some of the greatest spiritual masters of Catholic spirituality. In his Rule, St. Benedict of Nursia urged his monks to remind themselves daily of the fact that they would one day die.[1] St. Francis of Assisi referred to death in familial terms in his famous “Canticle of the Sun,” giving her the title “Sister Death.” And in the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius recommended using reflection upon death as a method for discernment.[2]

Recently in one of my religion classes, my ninth graders and I were thinking about how important the virtue of faith is in the Gospels. Faith usually seems to be a free-will assent that Jesus waits for in order to act in and through a person. But there is also the woman with the hemorrhage, whose faith draws healing power out of Jesus on its own (see Mk 5:30). Then there is the healing of the paralytic, which expanded our discussion to the Communion of Saints and the power of intercessory prayer: “when he saw their faith” (Lk 5:20), Jesus proceeded to heal the paralytic. One student pointed out that we don’t actually know whether the paralytic believed Jesus could do this. The man’s cure was provoked by the faith of his friends. What is this mystery? How are we united in Christ and with one another?

The ordinary means of this identification with Jesus is the Sacrament of Baptism. The sanctifying grace we receive is the very life of God in us; through baptism, we “come to share in the divine nature” (2 Pt 1:4). United to Christ, we are by that very fact united to God and so to one another. Jesus said, “I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me” (Jn 17:20–21). This is the reality of the Communion of Saints. Our personal sanctity is not the exclusive goal of our union with Christ; its ultimate purpose is the building up of the Body of Christ, the Church, the whole Christ. As CCC 1267 states: “Baptism makes us members of the Body of Christ: ‘Therefore . . . we are members one of another’ [Eph 4:25]. Baptism incorporates us into the Church. From the baptismal fonts is born the one People of God of the New Covenant, which transcends all the natural or human limits of nations, cultures, races, and sexes: ‘For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body’ [1 Cor 12:13].”

Bl. Fr. Marie-Eugene of the Child Jesus, OCD, emphasizes that this union is the work of the Holy Spirit in and through each one of us: “We know that it is the Spirit of Love who carries out the eternal design of God. He placed the foundations for it by bringing to pass the mystery of the Incarnation in the womb of Mary. Since then, He continues His work by pouring into our souls a filial charity that identifies us with the Incarnate Word, Christ Jesus. This grace makes us one with Christ, that we may form with Him the whole Christ.”[1] In The Reed Of God, Caryll Houselander points out that this identification takes place slowly and, as its fruit, gives us God’s power to live his life here and now: “What we are asked to do is to be made one with Christ, to allow Him to abide in us, to make His home in us, and gradually, through the oneness that results from living one life, and through the miracles of His love, consummated again and again in Communion with Him, to become Christs, to live in Him as Our Lady did. When we are changed into Him as the bread into the Host, then with His power we can follow His example.”[2]

“I die, but God does not die! . . . Viva Cristo Rey!”

— Last words of Anacleto González Flores, 20th century martyr[1]

The accounts of the Christian martyrs never fail to captivate. Whatever our circumstances—young or old, believer or non-believer—we are attracted to stories of those who prefer death to renouncing their faith. We can be awed by the excitement of their adventure and their perseverance and determination in facing their heroic deaths at the hands of executioners or wild beasts. Yet, to equate martyrology to dramatic narrative misses the theological significance of Christian suffering and sacrifice.

The root of the word “martyr” comes from the ancient Greek legal term μάρτυς, “mártus,” meaning “witness” or “testimony.” In the early days of the Church, imprisonment and death remained a common fate for Christians who refused to recant their belief in the Gospel. But despite pagan and secular efforts to eradicate Christianity through the elimination of her stubbornly outspoken and often-prominent adherents, the Church continued to grow in numbers.

Tertullian, a second-century Father of the Church, offered an allegorical observation as he defended his fellow Christians against the sadistic oppression by the civil authorities in his Apologeticus:

Nor does your cruelty, however exquisite, avail you; it is rather a temptation to us. The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed. Many of your writers exhort to the courageous bearing of pain and death . . . ; and yet their words do not find so many disciples as Christians do, teachers not by words, but by their deeds.[2]

It goes without saying that Christianity has faced various kinds and levels of hostility throughout history from governments and societies. Christians have often been forced to choose between moral or religious values and civic or cultural values. Material goods, reputations, jobs, freedom, and even lives have been at stake—and are today in many places. One major milestone in the conflict between Christianity and the state came in the year 249, when the Roman emperor Decius issued an empire-wide decree ordering all citizens to participate in pagan sacrifices. The exact nature of the sacrifice varied from place to place, but it typically involved an incense offering, a libation (or offering of wine), and eating some sacrificial meat. This is unique in the history of the Roman state religion to that point, as performance of actual religious rituals had almost never been prescribed by law for the average citizen.

The Decian Persecution

Though we do not have the text of Decius’ decree, we know quite a bit about its enforcement from several sources. Most notable among these are the writings of St. Cyprian, who was bishop of Carthage (in modern-day Tunisia) from 249 until his martyrdom during the persecution of Valerian in 258. As bishop of the second-most prominent city in the western half of the Roman empire, Cyprian was on the forefront of Christian reactions to the decree to sacrifice. It is largely through his letters and treatises, especially On the Lapsed, that we learn three things. First, we learn what was asked of Christians (and, in fact, all citizens) during the enforcement of Decius’ decree. Second, we learn how Carthaginian Christians reacted to the decree. Finally, we learn how the Church, especially the hierarchy, viewed the differing Christian responses. These facts can give modern-day Christians, who face all kinds of hostility and persecution, insight into how the early Church understood the Christian responsibility under duress and whether there was any flexibility in acceptable responses.

What we ultimately need to understand is how Christians, then and now, react to pressures from governments and societies. So I will focus first on Christian reactions to the decree and how these reactions were viewed by Church leaders. We can break down Christian reactions to the decree into two categories. First were those who were called on to sacrifice but completely and publicly resisted to the point of suffering. Some were put in jail, had their property confiscated, or underwent torture; some were ultimately put to death. In their suffering, they were called “confessors” (because they confessed, or proclaimed, Christ publicly) and in their deaths, “martyrs.”

The second category includes those who came to be known as the “lapsi”—the lapsed or fallen. In this category, there were two types: There were those who, when called upon to sacrifice, did just that. After the end of the persecution, St. Cyprian described these in On the Lapsed as, shall we say, eager. He wrote: “Without any compulsion they hastened to the forum, they hurried of themselves to their death, as if this was what they had long been waiting for, as if they were embracing the opportunity to realize the object of their desires.”[1] He is writing here, of course, not about the physical death of the martyrs but the spiritual death of those called the sacrificati, or the sacrificers.

However, there is another group that came to be called the libellatici, “those who have little books.” Because the Romans did not have a central database of those who had followed the edict, they tracked participation by issuing libelli, or little books, to those who had sacrificed. We still have today around 40 of these libelli, mostly from Egypt. These show that they functioned as certificates of sacrifice, signed not only by the sacrificer but by the local commission in charge of enforcing the decree, as well as, in some cases, a professional scribe or another person who held power of attorney for the sacrificer. Once you had sacrificed, if an official demanded to know whether you were in good legal standing, you could show your libellus to prove that you were. Evidence suggests that perhaps two copies were made of each libellus, one being kept by the petitioner and one deposited in the local archives.

From the earliest years of Christian history, the Church referred to the Blessed Virgin Mary as the New Eve. For example, in about 180 A.D., St. Irenaeus wrote that “The knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary.”[1] Many of the Early Church Fathers who came after him continued this tradition of beginning in the Old Testament with Eve to teach about Mary. Why did they start there instead of the New Testament? Why must we, too, start there?

Starting in the Right Place

I spent many years as an evangelical Protestant before I became a Catholic. Even though I had a great love of Scripture and taught many Bible studies, I never really “saw” Mary in the New Testament. I knew she was an important part of Jesus’ story, of course, but because of her few recorded words and appearances, I simply never gave her much thought. To me, it seemed impossible to arrive at Catholic teaching about Mary from the scant references we find about her in the New Testament. I chalked up her exalted role in Catholic teaching to sentimentality. All of us love our mothers. Catholics love the mother of Jesus. I left it at that.

When I had cause to think about the claims of the Catholic Church, I noticed right away that the Church has always begun in the Old Testament to explain Mary. The early chapters of Genesis tell us that “In the beginning,” God created male and female to be the flesh and blood fullness of his image and likeness on earth (see Gn 1:1; 1:26–27). When they fell, God’s response to their disobedience was to curse his enemy, the serpent, who was the real culprit in that drama. He vowed to send another man and woman, a mother and her Son, to victoriously finish the battle begun in Eden (see Gn 3:15). This makes perfect sense! If, from the beginning, God intended the masculine and the feminine, together, to be the icons of his image and likeness in creation, then we should expect to find both a man and a woman to herald the start of his re-creation after the Fall. Mary’s role in the Church’s teaching is theological, not sentimental. I finally had eyes to see this, and it changed everything for me.

I am reading a remarkable book. It’s called How Saints Die: 100 Stories of Hope by the Italian Carmelite Antonio Maria Sicari. The book reveals just how much can be learned about the saints by how they face their own death. The saints, of course, are ordinary human beings—not a one born with a halo—who have persevered in their Christian life. Each has grown in heroic virtue by God’s grace.

Frequently in the pages of this book the reader is confronted by human beings demonstrating a shocking serenity and trust in God amidst dire circumstances at the end of life. Whether dying of disease or advanced years, or often violently through the malice of others, each of these women and men has been deeply conformed to the self-giving love of Christ. In facing death, each could truly say “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21) or “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20)!

When I was much younger, as I was coming to the faith in the 1980s, I loved reading the lives of the saints. I also naively believed that Christian persecution was mostly a thing of the past. In fact, the 20th century witnessed the murder of millions of Christians. And the 21st century, when considering the serious adversities facing Christians, especially in parts of the Middle East and Africa, remains deeply troubling. In our time, no matter where we live in the world, the more the Catholic worldview is rejected the more we can expect that greater persecution is coming.

Of course, such persecution shouldn’t surprise us. We follow the One who died nailed to the Cross. And Jesus himself said, “Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me” (Mt 5:11). These words show us that it’s truly not a matter of “if” Christians are persecuted; our Lord said, “when . . . they persecute you.” We can, in fact, presume that such persecution will happen to us in one form or another. This has been the normative reality for Christians from the earliest centuries of Christianity.

What are we to do when faced with present or future Christian persecution? It seems to me two things are necessary.

“Yes, ‘tis sweet to trust in Jesus, / just from sin and self to cease, / just from Jesus simply taking / life and rest, and joy and peace.”[1] These lyrics, sung repeatedly in my youth, planted in my heart seeds of longing to trust Jesus, to hear his voice, to take him at his word, to be confident that he speaks to me. So far, the journey has consisted of trudging through miles of the mud of my doubts and renewed resolves, punctuated by joyful epiphanies and triumphs. I also look back on humiliating defeats from which, paradoxically, my trust in God’s love and mercy grew more confident than I once imagined possible.

I was still a child when I began to conceive of growth in holiness as something like a self-improvement project, with the goal of eliminating vice and growing in virtue. If something went wrong, I’d ask myself where I messed up and make a resolve to do better next time. If I had a nightmare, I’d chastise myself for not praying before I went to sleep. This “be good, and God will bless you” approach to my relationship with God kept me on the straight and narrow in my youth and followed me into adulthood.

Although I could quote Scripture, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast” (Eph 2:8–9), shadows obscured my view of the heart of the Father. So, I tried repeatedly to prove my love for him. I worried whether I was pleasing God rather than simply receiving his love for me. Thankfully, Jesus, our Good Shepherd, comes to our aid even when we’ve lost our way (see Lk 15:3–7).

There’s something particularly mysterious about the motherhood of Mary. Her fiat that shook the whole world as the uncontainable God chose to be contained within her womb.