It was my freshman year of high school, and I was attending a youth retreat focused on the Theology of the Body. My 15-year-old self had no idea what the Theology of the Body really meant, but I had heard someone throw around the words “sex and dating,” so it intrigued me enough to attend. I was raised in the Catholic faith; my parents took us to Mass each Sunday and even taught our religious education classes. At this point in my life, I knew the faith was a priority for my family, and I believed in God, but I also had my own priorities in high school, like being popular and well-liked. But what I thought would be a fun weekend with friends to giggle about the word “sex” turned out to be a life-changing weekend.

My youth minister had invited two theology graduate students, Amber and Chris, to give the talks on the retreat. When Amber and Chris spoke about God’s plan for relationships and his desire for an intimate relationship with each of us, my heart was drawn into this beautiful concept of a personal relationship with the Lord. As they spoke about this personal God who desired an intimate relationship with us, it was as if my heart began to burn within me. I began to realize a deep desire for an intimate relationship with God. It was from this place of intimacy with the Lord that they taught us about God’s plan for intimacy in marriage and the sexual act. Chris and Amber gave examples of how God had brought real freedom into their own lives through his grace. When they spoke about these topics of sex and dating, it was not as if I was hearing an empty theological lecture. It was clear that they were speaking from a place of living this intimate relationship with the Lord.

My beautiful mother, Kathleen Pauley, died on June 4, 2025 at the age of 83. She is an extraordinary person and an intimate friend of Jesus. She lived with suffering from a very early age and was well acquainted with the Cross. In the weeks of serious illness that led up to her death, I learned many things from her about our life in Christ, lessons which have helped me see suffering and death in a way more aligned with our Christian hope.

First, some background: Kathy was a woman after the Lord’s heart. Around four decades ago, she told me of being asked by our Lord in prayer if she would suffer for souls. She gave her assent to this seemingly strange request. Days later, she slipped on a puddle of water in the produce department of the grocery store and severely injured her back. And from that day on, she experienced a series of serious physical setbacks that lasted the rest of her life. Although her suffering had begun much earlier through a very difficult and painful childhood, this choice she was given by our Lord was a pivotal moment in her life where he made a proposal of love and she freely accepted it. After decades of intentionally sharing in his Cross, the final stage of her earthly pilgrimage took place over two months as she battled a very serious blood infection in her heart. This infection caused a heart attack and several strokes, which impaired her vision by about 80%. In being a member of her family who sought to accompany her through this experience, she taught me much from her school of suffering. Here are seven lessons I learned from her.

Lesson One: Suffering That Stays

My mother understood something remarkable about God: out of love, he only infrequently chooses to take away suffering. This is counterintuitive, of course, for us humans, who see suffering as the greatest of evils—as something from which we want God to rescue us. Instead, he chooses to enter deeply and intimately into our experience of suffering, accompanying us in radical, divine solidarity. Kathy experienced the presence of God in her suffering quite profoundly; she spoke sometimes of her experience of being deeply loved by Jesus as she suffered. It seems that this confidence in his closeness allowed her to embrace reality as it confronted her. Often, of course, she didn’t feel close to him; yet, she persevered in those periods of dryness and spiritual darkness. But always he provided for her, usually in unexpected ways.

Here’s a compelling example I witnessed: In her last days, I found myself marveling at how the Lord had drawn close and was uniquely providing for the needs of his beloved daughter as she suffered. Because of the strokes she had had, she often hallucinated. Yet, most of her hallucinations were of the loveliest type. For a span of about a week, she frequently believed she was not in a hospital bed facing a dire prognosis but rather at an enormous party with all of her family and friends around her. As I sat by her bedside, she asked me time and again if people were having a good time. And at one point, she brought a rush of tears to my eyes when she told me she was so excited because my daughters and nieces were going to “put on a show” for everyone, drawing on memories of a dozen years ago when the then-toddling Pauley girls loved to put on shows for Nana and Papa with play acting and singing.

Through these experiences with her, I found myself marveling at how the Lord was taking good care of his beloved and giving her joy. For much of my time with her, she was, as they say, happy as a clam. I know this isn’t the experience of most who suffer—and it certainly wasn’t her experience through most of her own life as she struggled to embrace some difficult realities. But, for a few days during her final weeks, her experience of joy showed me God’s great tenderness and closeness to her. I was so grateful to him for this. While he rarely took away her suffering, it did bring about opportunities for intimacy and union with Jesus that were just breathtaking to behold.

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In every age of the Church, God raises up saintly men and women whose holiness builds up the community of the Church. These saints are living reflections of the face of Christ in the world, and their lives invite our imitation on the path of holiness aided by God’s grace. In our own time, the Church continues to raise up for our imitation saintly men and women who respond to our baptismal vocation to Christian discipleship. They remind us that the Christian life is lived out precisely within the community of the Church and the Communion of Saints.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, quoting the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, highlights our communion with the saints when it teaches that:

It is not merely by the title of example that we cherish the memory of those in heaven; we seek, rather, that by this devotion to the exercise of fraternal charity the union of the whole Church in the Spirit may be strengthened. Exactly as Christian communion among our fellow pilgrims brings us closer to Christ, so our communion with the saints joins us to Christ, from whom as from its fountain and head issues all grace, and the life of the People of God itself. (CCC 957; quoting Lumen Gentium 50; cf. Eph 4:1–6)

Each liturgical year on the fourth day of October, the Church celebrates the memorial of St. Francis of Assisi. This beloved saint embraced radical discipleship through poverty and the preaching of the Gospel to all—rich and poor, lowly and exalted. St. Francis was, and continues to be, a builder of the community of the Church through his radical witness to holiness of life and missionary discipleship. As we join the Church in celebrating his saintly life and in imitating his saintly virtues, an exquisite illuminated manuscript from the early 14th century offers a stirring visual catechesis for our contemplation.

At a regional bishop’s meeting that i recently attended, an animated dialogue took place regarding different catechetical approaches currently employed in our Catholic schools. The discussion was wide ranging, but several bishops lamented the all-too-common absence of any treatment of the “fear of the Lord.” It appears that many texts avoid all but a passing reference to it. What also became apparent is that, in numerous cases, the reason for its exclusion is that many teachers and catechists simply don’t understand it themselves! Many intentionally omit it in order to protect people, especially children, from what they judge to be a punitive focus that is out of keeping with modern religious sensibilities. The teaching is thought to be inherently Jansenist, and they fear its effect on children and catechumens. This is a tragedy, as nothing could be further from the truth.

Fear of the Lord is a critically important disposition of a person toward God. It acknowledges the infinite glory and majesty of the Supreme Being, the One Creator God who effortlessly sustains all that he has created in being. He is mysterious beyond comprehension, an all-consuming fire, at once terrible in power and fascinating beyond imagination. As the Catechism affirms, “we firmly believe and confess without reservation that there is only one true God, eternal infinite (immensus) and unchangeable, incomprehensible, almighty and ineffable, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; three persons indeed, but one essence, substance or nature entirely simple” (202) and one “infinitely above everything that we can understand or say” (206).

To truly grasp the immense mystery of God’s infinite splendor and grandeur is to be amazed. It is to be filled with deep religious awe. God is discovered as the numinous, omnipresent presence to which every creature owes its existence and to whom they must answer. The Catechism affirms that, when faced with God’s presence, humans discover their own insignificance and recognize God’s holiness (see 208). This is, of course, absolutely true and profoundly important. But it is also where the confusion begins.

Last spring, most of my family spent a semester at Franciscan University of Steubenville’s beautiful campus in Gaming, Austria. As an introvert, one of my worries going into the semester was getting to know a whole new group of coworkers and joining their community as an outsider. Never have I been more delighted to discover my worries were unwarranted.We were picked up at the airport by a beautiful and generous family. When we arrived to Gaming late at night, a benevolent philosophy professor insisted on bringing in our bags. There was warm pumpkin soup and tea waiting for us at the dinner table. And with a burst of joy and energy, four amazing Franciscan TOR sisters rushed into the house with hugs and words of welcome. Over the course of the next four months, the faculty and staff there became the dearest of friends. Never have I experienced friendship and community in such a concentrated way.

For most of us, our current cultural climate is one of stark isolation. With families spread out geographically more than ever, and with screens drawing us away from real human interaction, it is easy to live significantly withdrawn from good relationships. Without the cultural supports for community that previous generations enjoyed, unless we take intentional steps toward others, it’s very easy to lead a solitary and lonely life.

And yet, we human beings were made for communion with others. We know theologically that we were made for union with God (who is a communion of Trinitarian persons) and with all the baptized who are joined to him. And on a natural human level, we know that good relationships are critical to the flourishing of every human being—even if finding such authentic community can be a bewildering quest today.

Becoming a Channel of Grace in Catechesis

The OCIA class I was leading was about to enter the period of the catechumenate, and it was time for a talk on human sexuality and Christian anthropology. This talk had been looming in my mind for weeks prior, causing me no small amount of anxiety. I felt reasonably confident in my ability to communicate the Church’s teaching on these controversial topics, but it is always somewhat daunting for me to get up in front of a group of people and talk about sex, gender, and other “theology of the body” topics. As my audience was composed of adults who were seeking to become Catholic, I knew there was a good chance that many of them were still in need of conversion on these topics. They had all made some concrete step toward becoming Catholic, but nevertheless, the Church’s teaching on human sexuality can be a moment for some to walk away. In my mind, the stakes were high.

My first instinct when preparing a talk has always been to go to the Catechism or some other authoritative resource. For this particular topic, I turned to the great St. John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. While I was well acquainted with the Church’s teaching on human sexuality, I had never actually taken the time to read John Paul II’s catecheses on these topics. I was immediately struck by how thoroughly driven by Scripture each catechesis was. While Man and Woman He Created Them is by no means light reading, to me it read like an extremely well-done Bible study. The doctrinal conclusions that John Paul II arrived at seemed almost obvious because of the way in which he used Scripture to drive his arguments. Reading through his teachings was like being led by a highly skilled guide through a treacherous mountain range. And while John Paul II was the guide, the path was laid out by God himself. Reading Theology of the Body was like being in conversation with God. It was prayerful. I was so captivated by the book that I tore through it far quicker than I ever imagined I could.

C. S. Lewis’s devil Screwtape advises junior tempter Wormwood, “The parochial organization should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people . . . together in the kind of unity the Enemy desires.”[1] Christian community makes tangibly present communion with Christ. It is often the first place people begin to encounter him and believe in the possibility of his love, which is manifested through the love of the Church’s members. Even in its veiled, earthly form, the Communion of Saints has the power to radiate Christ to the world. This article will briefly examine the nature of this communion and its power to bear witness to Christ, as well as offer some ideas for fostering a deeper and more intentional living of this communion within our communities.

The Communion of Saints

The Communion of Saints on earth is quite simple: Its source is Christ; its soul is charity. Christ himself, on the evening before his Passion, prayed, “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, . . . that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me” (Jn 17:21, 23). The members of the Church are “a holy people united with the unity of the Trinity.”[2] The Holy Spirit unites the Church in a single bond of love. Moreover, in the Eucharist, Christ binds each person together so that they are members of this same whole.

Being enriched by Christ’s gift and made one in him opens our horizons. In the midst of its treatment of the Our Father, the Catechism has this stunning line: “Finally, if we pray the Our Father sincerely, we leave individualism behind, because the love that we receive frees us from it” (2792). God’s love frees us. We no longer need to protect ourselves. Transformed by the renewal of our minds (Rom 12:2), grace allows us to see the love God has bestowed on us. It opens our eyes to the fact that my brother or sister in the Lord is in some way part of me.[3] And it moves us to “leave individualism behind,” embracing this communion. We are able to live heroic charity, loving as we have been loved.

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God” (1 Jn 4:7). God takes our ordinary nature and, through grace, elevates it to share in his life. This means that simple, everyday gestures of love and care take on extraordinary depth. They are the “stuff” sanctity is made of. I can remember gathering with a group to pray for a friend who was dying. I knew her as my mentor and a gifted catechetical leader, but as others shared how they knew her, I began to realize there was so much more to her life of sanctity than just what she did for the Church in her role as catechist. One friend shared how my mentor had helped her with laundry during her prolonged recovery from surgery. Another spoke of how she had come to understand authentic family life when my mentor had opened her home to her and helped her. These simple, human gestures of love and self-sacrifice provided the deepest and most authentic witness to Christ that my mentor offered in her very full life. This is the kind of love Tertullian said caused the pagans to exclaim, “See how these Christians love one another!”[4] Sometimes it is the humblest gestures that speak the most loudly of Christ’s presence and love.

The modern ethos regarding sin is a perplexing one. On the one hand, it seems that everything is morally okay, so long as it does not hurt anyone else. Yet, on the other hand, there are very strange and strict social sins that are virtually forbidden unless one wants to end up ostracized by the modern (and oftentimes online) community. Sin today is treated with an increasingly permissive attitude. What stands out as the overarching theme of this new morality, however, is a law of radical individualism regarding sin. Everything is acceptable if it feels good for the individual, as long as social norms are not violated.

Our Communal Lord and Savior

This strange and ambiguous moral philosophy espoused by our modern world stands in sharp contrast to the revelation of Scripture and the teaching of the Church. Particularly, the law of radical individualism stands in opposition to our belief in the “Communion of Saints,” professed in the Creed. The Catechism is beautifully succinct in its identification of this entity: “The communion of saints is the Church” (946).

The Second Vatican Council emphasized the Church as the “People of God,” a descriptor that is very fitting in our age.[1] The Communion of Saints, therefore, must be seen in light of this community of persons around Christ, their head. This Communion of Saints is a true communion—a sharing among persons of what is held in common. The Catechism proceeds to express that what is shared in common are spiritual goods, which are shared among the People of God both on earth and in heaven. The antiphon of the Eastern liturgies captures this: “God’s holy gifts for God’s holy people” (CCC 948).

What emerges from this basic structure is the antithesis of radical individualism. As members of the People of God and of the Communion of Saints, we do not merely have a personal Lord and Savior but a God who, in gathering us into a community, acts within this communion. Jesus Christ saves us personally, but not alone; his work is mediated by the action of the entire Church, of which he is the head. Lumen Gentium, Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, expresses this beautifully: “God, however, does not make men holy and save them merely as individuals, without bond or link between one another. Rather has it pleased Him to bring men together as one people” (no. 9).

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.

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The renowned italian painter Caravaggio (1571–1610) was active in Rome for most of his artistic career. He was widely known for his dramatic use of lighting, a technique that had a profound influence on the Baroque period of art history. He was a master of chiaroscuro, the use of strong contrasts between light and dark. He used this technique to create a sense of depth and realism that made his paintings deeply moving.

The dramatic intensity of Caravaggio’s work mirrored the intensity of his personal life. We know about much of Caravaggio’s life through the extensive police records that documented his disorderly conduct. He was notorious for his brawling and arguments with not only his peers but also those in authority. His volatile temper culminated in the murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni over a bet on a game of tennis. Caravaggio knew very well the effects and darkness of sin. He was a man who struggled between darkness and light in his personal life. We see that same tension vividly portrayed in his paintings.

One of Caravaggio’s most striking works, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602), visually captures the Gospel of John’s account of Thomas’s doubt and growth in faith. According to the Gospel of John, Thomas was not present when Jesus first appeared to the other disciples after the Resurrection. Unwilling to believe their testimony, Thomas declared, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (Jn 20:25). Caravaggio captures the transformative moment of Thomas encountering the risen Christ.