Saints are still among us

by Paula Davies
WE are in a quandary about saints these days. While one lot are being lopped off the official lists another bunch are getting themselves canonised.
Poor St. George, patron saint of England though he may be, has no longer an assured place in Heaven. And all those girls Who took Philomena as a Confirmation name will have to tell their daughters to make a less mythical choice.
Even dear St. Christopher, whose medal adorns half those lethal instruments hurtling round our roads, has been relegated to a saintly limbo.
1 suppose it was right to demote people who seem to have been more myth than reality, and anyway the ones left behind led lives which seem to have had more connection with fiction than fact. We cannot do without myth, and the saints' life stories are nothing if not mythical.
I still love to read those short passages in my old missal which often went into gory detail about the saints and their exploits or miracles. There was the poor man who was roasted on a gridiron and the other saint whose blood liquefies and bubbles once a year on the anniversary of his death.
If a worthy matron was not being put to death in some hideous fashion a bishop was "falling asleep in the Lord" in the year 400 or thereabouts. These thumbnail sketches at the top of every date in the calendar kept me happy at Mass for years, but most of these saints, like the missal itself, are now sadly out of date.
Despite the Forty Martyrs, saints are looked on askance these days. You might almost say they are out of fashion. With the possible exception of St. Francis of Assissi — who is to have the dubious honour of a film to be made about him and St. Anthony of Padua, who finds almost anything provided you pay him enough, saints no longer seem to attract the devotion once poured out on them.
As if to redress the balance, the American poet and writer Phyllis McGinley has written a book in which she attempts, as she says to "chip away the plaster in which they too often become encased."
"Saint Watching" is what sh,e calls it, and that is exactly what she has succeeded in doing, and by watching them very carefully she had also succeeded in making them seem relevant to the present day by rescuing them from their "pious niches" and celebrating "their eccentricities and persistent mortality".
Like most of us, she has her favourites. St. Augustine and St. Francis Borgia are people she has obviously studied in some depth. She shows them, not in the whiter than white garments that hagiographers usually clothe them in, but in their everyday greyness which makes them so much easier to love.
She shows them as saints who became saints almost despite themselves — the one who struggled for years with what seemed incurable sensuality, the other who triumphed over a background and heredity that seemed insuperable.
She writes of the saints not as supernatural or superhuman creatures but rather as ordinary mortals with heroic stamina, ordinary people made extraordinary by a compelling love for their fellow human beings.
Such compulsion ensured -and still does — that saints never did things by halves. Not for them the easy salving of a conscience by just giving money, though God knows that is not to be despised.
Rather they threw themselves wholeheartedly into loving others more than themselves and followed the teachings of Christ literally.
There was Robert Bellarmine, for example who, although a cardinal living in a palace, lived himself like a pauper, eating bread "the food of the poor" and doing without fires in order to give away what they would have cost.
He even pulled down the red wool curtains and had them made into clothes for the poor with the comment," the walls won't catch oold."
If the saints had money or position they gave it away. If they were poor like St. Francis, they begged for others. With the growth of public concern in more recent times there hasn't been so much opportunity for acts of such crazy generosity.
But Pius X was cast in the same mould as the medieval saints. "He seldom had a coat, he gave away even his socks." As Pope he evidently replaced the jewels in his official cross and ring with paste, and succeeded, by the end of his reign, in getting rid of the Church's material possessions in France.
Phyllis McGinley's book is full of such fascinating anecdotes; but she discusses. too, their very human weaknesses and their very human special love for another person.
The idea that saints made their own special road towards sainthood, needing help from no one but God, is neatly scotched with the examples of Francis and Clare, Benedict and his sister Scholastica. Francis de Sales and Jane Chantal, Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac, among many others.
"God deliver me from sullen saints," Teresa was known to cry. With her, as with most of the others even in the present day, life could never be dull. Goodness has a fascination far beyond evil, but it is not so often met.
When you meet it you find goodness as unmistakeable as it is exciting, as inspiring as it is heartwarming. We have saints among us now. They can never entirely go out of fashion.
*"Saint Watching", by Phyllis McGinley. Collins 35s.