Fr Ronald Rolheiser
When I was a young boy growing up in a Catholic community, the catechesis of the time tried to inspire the hearts of the young with stories of martyrs, saints, and other people who lived out high ideals in terms of virtue and faith. I remember one story in particular which inspired me, the story of a third-century Christian martyr, St Tarcisius.
As legend (or truth) has it, Tarcisius was a twelve-year-old acolyte during the time of the early Christian persecutions. At that time, Christians in Rome were celebrating the Eucharist in secret in the catacombs. After those secret Masses, a deacon or an acolyte would carry the Eucharistic species, the Blessed Sacrament, to the sick and to prisoners. One day, after one of those secret Masses, young Tarcisius was carrying the Blessed Sacrament enroute to a prison when he was accosted by a mob. He refused to hand over the Blessed Sacrament, protected it with his own body, and was beaten to death as a result.
As a twelve-year-old boy, that story inflamed my romantic imagination. I yearned for that kind of ideal in my life. In my young imagination, Tarcisius was the kind of hero that I wanted to be.
Long way
We’ve come a long way since then, both in our culture and in our churches. We are no longer moved much romantically by either the saints of old or the saints of today. Yes, we still make an official place for them in our churches and in our abstract ideals, but we are now, in effect, moved much more by the lives of the rich, the famous, the beautiful, our pop stars, our professional athletes, the physically gifted, and the intellectually gifted. They now inflame our imaginations, draw our admiration, and it’s them we want to be like.
In the early nineteenth century, Alban Butler, an English convert, collected stories of the lives of the saints and eventually set them together in twelve volume set, famously known as Butler’s Lives of the Saints. For nearly two hundred years, these books inspired Christians, young and old. No longer.
Today, Butler’s Lives of the Saints has effectively been replaced by multiple magazines, podcasts, and websites which chronicle the lives of the rich and famous and stare out at us from our phones, our laptops, and from every newsstand and grocery store checkout line.
In effect, we have moved: from St Tarcisius to Justin Bieber; from Therese of Lisieux to Taylor Swift; from Thomas Aquinas to Tom Brady; from St Monica to Meryl Streep; from St Augustine to Mark Zuckerberg; from Julian of Norwich to Oprah; and from the first African American saint, St Martin de Porres, to Lebron James. It’s these people who now inflame our romantic imagination and whom we would most want to be like.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that these people are bad or that there’s anything wrong with admiring them. Indeed, we owe them some admiration because all beauty and talent take their origin in God who is the author of all good things. From a saint’s virtue to a movie star’s physical beauty, to an athlete’s grace, there’s only one author at the origin of it all, God.
Thomas Aquinas once rightly pointed out that to withhold a compliment from someone who deserves it is a sin because we are withholding food that someone else needs to live on. Beauty, talent, and grace need to be recognised and acknowledged. Admiration is not the issue. Rather, the issue is that while we need to admire and acknowledge talent, grace, and beauty, these do not in themselves radiate virtue and saintliness. We shouldn’t automatically identify human grace with moral virtue, though that’s the temptation today.
Weakness
As well, a weakness in our churches today is that while we have vastly refined and upgraded our intellectual imagination and now have better and healthier theological and biblical studies, we struggle to touch hearts. While we have more power to satisfy the intellect, we struggle to touch the heart, that is, we struggle to get people to fall in love with their faith and especially with their churches. We struggle to inflame their romantic imagination, as we once did by invoking the lives of the saints.
Where might we go with all of this? Can we find saints again who inflame our ideals? Can the fine work on hagiography (on the lives of the saints and other moral giants) being done today by Robert Ellsberg become the new Butler’s Lives of the Saints? Can secular biographies of some moral giants in our own age draw our imitation? Can the life of a Dag Hammarskjold become for us a moral and faith inspiration? Is there a new Therese of Lisieux out there?
Today, more than ever, we need inspiring stories about women and men, young and old, who have lived out heroic virtue. We need moral exemplars, moral mentors. Otherwise, we cheat ourselves by simplistically identifying human grace with moral virtue.