An unconscious advocate for St Gilbert

ON BEHALF OF all Chesterto nians who think the life of the great man merits at least the opeoing of a cause, I'd like to thank Melanie McDonagh for her very clever and satirically humorous article entitled "Oh Please, Not Another Saint" (Catholic Herald, 2 June).
Under the guise of seeming orotest, she makes a very strong case for the canonization of GK.
You can still find the Confessions of St Augustine in the local bookstore. If a person's life were really exciting, even canonization is not able to dim the appeal.
There's Saint Catherine of Siena, Catherine of Genoa, Theresa of Avila, Don Bosco, the Little Flower, oh, so many, many whose lives are still being read because they were canonized and made known and approved by the Church. Without canonization they might have been lost to millions.
She mentions that she herself did a paper on St Thomas More, but that the title of saint "has a far more debilitating effect upon discussion of the man than the title of barony or earldom does upon living men."
She knows, of course, that because Thomas More was declared a saint, his life and example have inspired millions of people.
It has given countless laymen and laywomen hope that their lives as public servants can be holy.
Canonizing people is not a human act; rather, it is the Holy Spirit who inspires love and devotion for these heroes and heroines in the hearts of the faithful. We need saints. It is not a matter of justifying their lives.
In what is perhaps her greatest subtlety, Melanie states the most cogent argument for GK's canonization. She writes: "We are, after all, in a position to appreciate the sanctity of an individual's life without it being rammed down our throats."
This veiled argument needs some clarification.
Everyone knows that often, in the history of hagiography, some saints' lives really have become shrouded in miasma, that is to say, in an "unwholesome air".
There seems to he a human tendency to over-idealize our ideals.
I have noted myself rather a miasmafication of the lives of holy people.
But what Melanie says is perfectly true: in our day and age, we can now appreciate the lives of outstanding people without having to over-idealize them.
Our age glories in seeing greatness in human weakness, in humanity as it really is. Perhaps that is one of the rare virtues of the modern world.
This is the whole point about GK Chesterton: he is so well known that we could easily avoid the miasma.
We have his diaries, pictures, writings, critical commentaries on almost every day of his life, eye witness accounts, tape recordings. It would be almost impossible to cover him with miasma. We finally have the golden opportunity to see sanctity in a fully human being.
Canonizing him would make sanctity utterly possible for those living in the midst of the world. God knows we have enough saints who left the world. We desperately need to canonize a few thousand who stayed in it.
Too many saints have been robbed of their humanity by false hagiography.
But they themselves were totally human. We have a magnificent chance (or rather, the Holy Spirit does) of showing that God can indwell a really human person, a jounalist of Fleet Street.
Wouldn't it be wonderful! Thanks Melanie!
Fr Robert Wild GK Chesterton Society of Ottowa Ontario, Canada
THE IDEA THAT Chesterton would not wish to become a saint is too silly for words. I am sure he is striding impatiently around heaven, waiting for the Church to get its act togther.
Francis X. McGuinness London