Sanctity and Society
545 SANCTITY AND SOCIETY THE memorable celebration of the martyrdom of Father Jogues and his Jesuit companions at Auriesville, New York, called forth more than ordinary comments in the secular...
...There is a debt which the Hill of Martyrs should never let us as a people forget...
...Yet whatever they contributed to the background of our national life—and that was much, for while France yielded to other powers her vast domain, evoked by explorer, adventurer and priest, she virtually gave it to the building of a new nation—they have given are example of heroic virtue that ought never to be lost to that land to which their spirits gave their brave dust...
...Referring to the beatification of Jogues and his companions, the Times says that the Church has thus given recognition of its debt to these Jesuit heroes...
...As all ideals other than Christianity are at best mediocre, or partial, or tainted with falsity, and cannot fully satisfy the human soul, so the saint is singular among all human heroes in that he alone achieves his ideal, he alone escapes frustration, and therefore, he alone is safe for other men to follow...
...the ways of faith, hope, and love, of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance, all exemplified in a great and constant measure—to say nothing about the saint as one in whom the ineffable central mystery of religion, man's union with Divinity—has been, in greater or lesser degree, accomplished...
...It is like trying to analyze and to define poetry, or the soul of music, only it is a task vastly more delicate and difficult even than those, which have been the despair of critics since the beginning of literature...
...But he and his companions," it goes on to say, "in venturing their all in behalf of the spiritual and physical welfare of the savages in America, deserve something of the nation as well as of the Church...
...There are many signs—we will not say of the full return of the Christian dominance of society, but certainly of a stronger, and ever stronger, re-growth and influence and spread of Catholic Christianity...
...The saint will once more by common consent be accepted as the greatest man, the greatest woman...
...The reverent and sympathetic tone of these comments—particularly the remarkable editorial in the New York Times, suggests that there is returning to the consciousness of humanity after a long eclipse, some dawning realization of the social value of the mysterious thing called sanctity...
...Only by granting that the saints, or those who without achieving sanctity, search after it, at least are consistent idealists, although the ideal itself is a terrible mistake, can the more noble-minded unbelievers grant them a pitying admiration...
...his life means more good to mankind than the researches of all the scientists, the inventions of all the inventors, the books of all the philosophers, the creations of all the artists...
...The saint is our true leader...
...For both the will with which the martyrs accept and even welcome death, and the supernatural motive which inspires their will, issue into the supreme virtues that when achieved, make men and women into saints, and, incidentally perhaps, yet most surely, confer inestimable benefits upon others than themselves...
...He is greater and more powerful even than our millionaires—though to believe this is to be the supreme heretic from the really dominant creed of modernity...
...If and when Christianity becomes again predominant, these views will become general, popular, public, only questioned by rebels...
...That tens of millions of Catholics, in all parts of the earth, should heartily and unanimously hold these views, and yet that their views should be so little regarded by, and apparently have such small effect upon, the world and the world's public opinion, and the world's way of life, is, we think, a signal proof of the weak position of Christianity today...
...It is largely the fault of far too much of the literature concerning the saints— in its mealy-mouthed, bloodless, nerveless style, its timid if not cowardly avoidance of facts and realities concerning the humanity of the saints, particularly those of them—and they are many—who knew all the weaknesses and the faults and the crimes and the sins of life, that we think of saints as a class set far apart from us, and not as the true men and women, only stronger, truer than most, that in reality they are...
...The saint, surely, is none other than the pioneer of mankind in its great affair of transcending humanity, overcoming the limitations of mortality, and passing through weakness, pain, sorrow, disappointments, and death to strength, health, joy, reality and everlasting life...
...The answer that many believers give to the same question is at best very vague...
...He alone is the true realist...
...Their answer to the question is not that which would be given by the generality of men and women today, who, because they have no belief in God, cannot of course even dimly comprehend the idea of sanctity...
...They would not be saints at all, but creatures other than human, a separate and different order of beings...
...We cry his pardon...
...No flesh hath he...
...The saint seems to them one set so apart from the rest of us that he has really ceased to be human—a false idea, for which far too many poor books about saints must bear the responsibility for encouraging...
...sanctity recognized as the supreme object of human life...
...It is not that the saint may not be as other men and women are, and share their most human emotions, and weaknesses, and errors, and do their works, and sin, and fail...
...545 SANCTITY AND SOCIETY THE memorable celebration of the martyrdom of Father Jogues and his Jesuit companions at Auriesville, New York, called forth more than ordinary comments in the secular press...
...This is why every Christian altar, since the beginning of Christian worship, has contained the relic of a saint...
...For it hath died, 'Tis crucified...
...For those of us who are of this world, worldly— even though we may believe and even strive to act on our belief that the world is impermanent, its values not final, and that there is truly a spiritual universe transcending the material one—for us to speak about sanctity and the saints is to plunge into almost insuperable difficulties of understanding, of expression, of definition...
...When the soul of Gerontius, in Newman's great poem—"that poem," as Father Martindale writes, "in which, as in none other, says (dare we say...
...the Apocalypse, the walls of time and space flicker and 546 THE COMMONWEAL October 14, 1925 grow thin before the pressure of eternity"—when the soul of Gerontius was borne through the cold deeps of death toward Judgment, he heard one answer given to that question by the demons, who in raucous chorus howled— What's a saint...
...To such, the saint must and can only seem the waster and the denier, even the enemy of life, the refuser of happiness, the anticipator of death, the supreme victim of illusion...
...One whose breath Doth the air taint Before his death...
...This is why the communion of the saints—the interpretation of all Christian life by prayers to the saints, by reliance upon their beneficial influence, by the inspiration of their lives, by the limitation of their deeds—is of the very essence of religion, and therefore, of the very marrow of human life, because life without religion is not life, but death...
...That holy clay— This gains guerdon, So priestlings prate...
...For such views would be normal in a truly Christian society...
...The humblest and littlest saint is a greater conqueror than Caesar or Alexander or Napoleon...
...the ways of the high virtues of human effort...
...But even if the demons deride, they know the power of sanctity—as defeated men may scoff at and curse their conquerors, yet be obliged to acknowledge their superiority...
...A bundle of bones Which fools adore . . • When life is o'er, Which rattle and stink . . . E'en in the flesh...
...What is a saint...
...Were that the case, how could they help us, or encourage, or understand us, or be our friends, counselors, and leaders...
...They do not know the saint as one who has lived a life in which he has been heroic in the ways in which all men and women are deficient, or else merely ordinary, or at best fitfully active...
Vol. 2 • October 1925 • No. 23
