Peter CostelloBlessed Among Us: Day by Day with Saintly Witnesses
by Robert Ellsberg
(Liturgical Press, distributed by the Norwich Press, £19.99)
Has the nature of sainthood, as perceived in the 21st Century, changed?
Certainly when you look at older books about the saints, such as Adamnan’s biography of St Columba, one of the most important documents of Early Christian Ireland, they are replete with miracles.
Columba’s modern biographers have quietly discarded all this mystical apparatus of the 7th Century, to present us with a stubborn but active and courageous man who heroically toiled to spread a new faith among the Picts as well as among the colonial Irish invaders of Scotland.
Mystical phenomena remained an essential part of saints’ lives over the centuries, as a perusal of Alban Butler and other hagiographers will show. Scholars such as the Bollandists laboured long to try and recover the truth; but even for them such a quality could be elusive
Nevertheless a large part of the attraction of many saints lay in their connection with mystical phenomena, as we can see in the modern devotion to Bernadette, the Curé d’Ars, or St Pio.
Here many people felt they could have an immediate contact with the transcendent – even though they are taught that such a link can be made more immediately through the Eucharist. That so many popular saints are very recent cannot be right, for a Church 2,000 years old. What of all the others?
Imagination
Author Robert Ellsberg is a well-established Catholic writer and publisher in the US. In his early years he was an associate of the Servant of God Dorothy Day, of the Catholic Worker movement. Her influence still persists in his imagination in choosing these holy persons for today. This book derives from his regular series in Give Us This Day, a popular periodical with prayers for today’s Catholic, which can also be found online.
St Pio finds his place in this book, but readers will be surprised and delighted at the many others who are gathered in with him, some 730. What dominates this book is an attempt to seek out examples of modern witness, a witness based on service and spiritual love and kindness. To test it I looked to see what saints were associated by the author with my birthday.
These were C. F. Field (d.1940) and Jean Goss (d.1991). Neither are formally canonised, which is why blessed is in the title of the book. Field was not even a Catholic, but an Anglican priest who left his orders to follow Ghandi back to India, where he worked tirelessly for social justice. Jean Goss was a peacemaker whose life was changed by WWII. He and his wife helped Adolfo Perez Esquivel (winner of the Nobel Prize) establish Servicio Paz y Justicia.
These names give a taste of how the selection was made. There are miracles here, miracles often of a special kind, but the blessed of today are seen as co-workers with the Lord.
Many names are well known and long familiar. The rest are fine but unfamiliar people.
This is a most stimulating book, for both the school library and the home; one which may well change lives through the variety of ways in which it shows mere mortals can attain holiness.
“What is my hope for readers?” the author asks. “That reading these stories will help these figures come alive for them as flesh and blood historical figures who struggled in their own time and place to be faithful. I also hope this will enlarge their own moral imaginations and enable them to think more creatively about the challenge to be faithful in our own historical context.”