Of sinners & saints Depression & other saintly virtues
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MINDS JOHN GARVEY OF SINNERS & SAINTS And sometimes both When she was told that many people considered her a saint, Dorothy Day fa-mously said, "I won't be dismissed that easily."...
...The reputation of locally renowned saints gradually spread, and the larger church acknowledged their goodness...
...In the world's history she stands alone- quite alone....There is no blemish in that rounded and beautiful character...she is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced...
...Eventually, other specific criteria were introduced: not only a life lived well on earth, but miracles-cures, usually-following the saint's death...
...And he makes a moving argument to that effect...
...It helps me to know that Therese of Lisieux suffered from depression...
...This definitely locates him...
...This followed the refusal of Archbishop John Ireland (1838-1918) to allow Toth to serve his people: Father Toth, whose wife had died, would scandalize the faithful because he had been married...
...In Man's Place in the Animal World, Twain wrote, "Man is but little lower than the angels...
...they aren't like us...
...What is interesting about Twain's essay is that it comes from the man whose bitter books The Mysterious Stranger and Letters from the Earth argue a case against Christianity...
...Popes and prelates choose to make saints of people whose lives underscore themes they find important: obedience, in a time when authority is questioned, or chastity in a time which seems lascivious, or more loyalty to the church, when people are more inclined to be loyal to king or emperor...
...It could be argued that Archbishop Ireland should be made a saint of the Orthodox Church, if results are what you are looking for...
...The process, in both the Eastern and Western churches, has never been free of politics...
...All the rules fail in this girl's case...
...He was a Ruthenian Catholic priest who led thousands of Eastern-rite Catholics into the Orthodox Church...
...Mother Maria of Paris, who died in one of Hitler's camps for helping Jews and others during the Vichy regime, will probably be canonized by the Orthodox Church...
...You hear things like, "I'm no saint, I'm only human"-as if saints were sinless, and we were not obliged to take our baptism all that seriously...
...It's a good idea to have a kind of prosecutor, who offers all the best reasons to think that perhaps this person was not so great after all...
...They weren't his favorite people...
...By acknowledging her as a saint, the church could show that it was capable not only of recognizing a saint, but also of recognizing its own tragic errors...
...The saints challenge us more when we see how ordinary, not how wonderful, they were.l, they were...
...The veneration of saints is a good thing, but it might be healthier to return to Paul's use of the word...
...I like the idea, found in the Western church, of the devil's advocate...
...John Paul II has eliminated this aspect of the canonization process, which sure makes things easier for the cause of Pius IX...
...People put a distance between themselves and saints: Saints are different...
...I was led to think about saints by a curious route: I was on a Mark Twain binge, and came across his 1904 essay on Joan of Arc...
...But Twain is rhapsodic: "She is the Wonder of the Ages....It is beyond us...
...The cult of the saints as we know them-those set aside by the church as examples of life in Christ-began with the earliest martyrs, who had certainly proved their wholeheartedness...
...The earliest layer of the process-someone locally renowned, whose reputation for holiness rises into the larger church-still exists, but it has been joined by more organized lobbying efforts (monasteries and religious orders pushing their candidates actively) or choices made from above...
...I like the fact that she found fasting onerous, and could never bring herself to give up smoking...
...One is that Twain isn't alone in his contradictions...
...At first I thought that Twain was using Joan as a stick with which to beat the French...
...Two things come to mind...
...Hagiographers point up the saints' wonderful qualities, and play into the hands of those who want to keep saints at a comfortable distance...
...Another is that the Catholic Church, which killed Joan in 1431, canonized her in 1920-perhaps because it was recognized that, given the interest of intellectuals in her case, she could be used as an argument against the church...
...If not for him, there would be many fewer Orthodox parishes in this country...
...My own Orthodox jurisdiction has canonized Alexis Toth (1845-1909) of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania...
...Carl Dreyer's silent film remains remarkably powerful, and George Bernard Shaw was a fan...
...She fascinated many intellectuals and artists around that time, and a little later...
...As the church became legal and martyrs therefore less likely, sainthood was applied to those who were exemplary in other ways...
...He is between the angels and the French...
...But when Paul's epistles mention the saints, they refer to the living, the people who are in the messy process of being made holy...
...I have seen reflexively antireligious people forced to a newer, wider opinion of religion when confronted with the examples of Bonhoeffer and Gandhi...
Vol. 129 • October 2002 • No. 17
