Few years ago NBC
hit the jackpot with the show Heros. If you have seen it you know that the
people on the show have various powers making them capable of doing things
beyond any sort of scientific possibility. There’s a man who can fly without
wings or any sort of propulsion. There’s a man who walks through walls. Another
one stops time and travels in time, etc. NBC built on people’s fascination with
the ability to do that beyond the physically possible. The Fantastic Four
movies, Spider man, Superman, and many television shows also build on this
fascination.
The
hagiographers, the biographers of saints of the past centuries, also built on
this fascination. Many times saints were presented as having all sorts of
preternatural powers, powers beyond whose of normal human beings. For example,
St. John Bosco was a deeply spiritual and dedicated priest of the 19th century.
Sadly, the Salesian hagiographers emphasized stories that had circulated that
Don Bosco had super human powers and did not give the proper attention they
should have given to his spirituality. St. Francis of Assisi was a preacher
with his eyes set on the journey to Christ. He was determined to fight against
the materialism that was taking hold of the people of his time. He demanded
that they return to the spirituality that was the strength of the Church. But
St. Francis is often portrayed as having powers that normal people would not
have, like having conversations with animals. Maybe he did, and maybe he
didn’t. My point is that many hagiographers cloud the messages of their
subject’s lives with pietistic fantasy.
In our lifetime,
we have experienced the lives of many great Catholics some of whom will most
likely have their holiness recognized by the Church in the process we call
canonization. Two of these are, of
course, Blessed Mother Theresa and Blessed John Paul II. Do we need to hear that either had some sort
of extraordinary power that demonstrated their holiness? Of course not! We saw their holiness. We
experienced their guidance to Christ.
Attributing all
sorts of strange powers to the saints actually diminishes their message. Instead
of seeing them as people like us whose heroic lives we can follow, we turn them
into preternatural creatures with powers beyond our capability. We should not
dismiss the saints so easily by turning them into plastic, fantasy figurines,
whose lives are nice stories but impossible for us to follow. No! the saints
were and are real people who had to fight the same battles we all fight to
serve the Lord. Some of them had
terrible tempers, like St. Jerome and St. Paul. Some of them had to recover
their spiritual lives after giving in to sin, like St. Ignatius Loyola, St.
Francis of Assisi, and, of course, St. Augustine. Some had to be courageous and stand for the
faith when every fiber of their body was terrified at what would happen to
them, like St. Thomas More, St. Agnes, and St. Vincent de Paul.
The saints were
normal human beings like you and me, only they were better at being human than
the rest of us. They were fully
human. To be fully human is to allow the
best of our humanity to dominate our lives.
As human beings we are both physical and spiritual. The saints allow the
spiritual aspect of their lives to be integrated into the physical. They were
and are the best of us. But they are not plastic. They are real.
So, what are we
doing this morning [evening] well, we are honoring the saints. We recognize
that they are with God and we call upon their intercession. What do we mean by
that? We ask the saints to pray to
the Lord for us, to help us in the struggles of our lives. We ask the saints to
help us also embrace our baptism in such a way that we also will be clothed
white in the Blood of the Lamb.
The saints are
our heroes. But they are neither the Fantastic Four nor Captain America or
Spiderman, the saints are real people whose heroic lives give us the example of
what it is to be fully human, and whose prayers give us the grace to be fully
the Lord’s ■
