Mother Angelica got it right when she said, “where most men work for degrees after their names, we work for one before our names: ‘Saint’. It’s a much more difficult degree to attain. It takes a lifetime, and you don’t get your diploma until you’re dead.”
In a nutshell, Mother Angelica articulated that we are all called to be saints, and didn’t flinch from explaining that, “it takes a lifetime” and you won’t enjoy the glory “until you’re dead”.
The canonised saints are our only true models of how we must spend our years on this earth so that we can get to Heaven. Taking a big picture view of the lives of the saints, I’ve found that they had at least three characteristics in common. The first is total and absolute dedication to prayer. After Our Lady of Fatima appeared to the three shepherds, the boy Francisco was known to offer eight Rosaries a day. But I’ve never read of anyone who has outdone Padre Pio – he would offer dozens of Rosaries every day.
Fr Marcellino Lasenzaniro witnessed that Padre Pio would wash his hands one at a time because he would pass his rosary from one hand to the other. One night before bed, St Pio said to Fr Carmelo, “I still have two rosaries to pray to day. I said only 34 so far.”
Perhaps a more realistic model for us laypeople is that of St Gianna Molla. She had a regular devotion to the Rosary, but also attended to the many duties of her joint vocation of medical doctor and mother. At her beatification, Gianna Molla’s daughter, also called Gianna gave Pope St John Paul II a little crown made out of St Gianna’s rosary.
The second characteristic shared by the saints was that they spent their days in the service of others. Faith without good works is dead. Returning to St Gianna Molla, in the early 1940s she volunteered with various charities, including the St Vincent de Paul while she was preparing to be a doctor and surgeon.
Three years ago Fr Hugh Simon-Thwaites went to God, and many consider that he might be a saint. Fr Hugh’s days were certainly filled with good works of every description. The thing that sets Fr Hugh apart was his zealous determination to forgive others and to do good deeds at the same time. He had been a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp for three and a half years during World War II and had to do gruelling manual labour, at times not terribly far removed from scenes in The Railway Man. After the camp was liberated, Fr Hugh was able to return home to England. During his many decades as a priest, he often met Japanese students and made a big effort to be especially kind to them, while never letting bad memories of his Japanese captors prevent him from doing good turns to the young Japanese people.
At this juncture, I’d like to underline the word ‘good’ in the phrase ‘faith without good works is dead’. I’ve known many holy people who strive to be saints, but unfortunately other people manipulate them into doing questionable favours for them by saying that their faith is dead unless they do them a favour. A holy person must have recourse to their conscience and be able to say no, if they think that someone else is asking them to do something bad or ill-advised.
The third characteristic and perhaps the one that is most difficult for modern people to follow is that saints did not speak well of themselves or live their lives so that they would be well-liked and they did not automatically assume that they were good enough to go to Heaven straight away. A sombre example is from the last moments of St Maria Goretti, whose feast day was last Sunday. She lay, dying in hospital, after her attacker had stabbed her fourteen times because she would not submit to his sexual advances.
The pharmacist asked her to remember him when she went to Heaven. She simply replied: “Who knows, which of us is going to be there first?”
A humorous example is from the life of St Philip Neri – we celebrate the 500th anniversary of his birth this month. St Philip would pretend to be drunk, so as to be funny, but also so that people would think less of him. There is a freedom in such humility. If someone owns up to all their faults and failings, it means they are less likely to be hurt by the insults from trolls or bullies.