Sainthood is within our reach

Solemnity of All Saints

One of the most common complaints I get from well-meaning Catholics who wish to see the Catholic Church become more inclusive and tolerant, a “big tent” organisation that takes in all and welcomes all, is that the Church seems to be too overly demanding and the bar which she sets is so exceedingly high, only perfect saints would make the mark. Robert Hugh Benson, the Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism, sets out this dichotomy: “one-half the world considers the Church too holy for human life, and the other half, not holy enough. We may name these critics, respectively, the Pagan and the Puritan.”

Against the pagan who accuses the Catholic Church of being over excessively demanding and against the puritan who claims that we will never be good enough for God, the Church actually teaches that though all have received the universal call to holiness at baptism, all have the potential and the means to become saints through sacramental graces, we continue to acknowledge that we are sinners, striving and struggling with temptation and the entrapments of sin, and therefore, constantly in need of redemption.

A saint is not someone who has never sinned but someone who refuses to be defeated by sin, refuses to allow sin to have the last word or plays hapless victim, because he or she believes in the power of redemption by the One who died on the cross to atone for our sins and who even now leads us on the path heavenward. A Saint understands and accepts the power of grace that “love covers over a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8) and where “sin abounds grace abounds much more” (Romans 5:20).

Saints are made, not born. Although one’s discipleship must deepen during the course of a Christian’s life through a slow process of conversion and growth in sanctity, he or she must be a thoroughly converted Christian disciple before he or she can become a saint. Acknowledging that we are “works in progress” is never in contradiction of the fact that we are called to “perfection.” The error of our modern times is that so many seek to give excuses for our mediocrity by canonising it, by making mediocrity the new benchmark of all aspects of life. We forget that we are made to be saints, being “half-baked” just doesn’t cut it. The saints remind us that perfection in terms of holiness is possible and attainable, even though it may take a life time of surrendering to God’s grace as we progress in discipleship.

In life, we often look up to certain celebrities as our heroes, idols, hoping and aspiring to become more like them. For us as well as for the saints, there is one model par excellence – it is Christ. By honouring the saints and by desiring to become more like them, we are aspiring to imitate what they hold up to us for our emulation – Christ Himself. This is what the beatitudes present to us - an image of Christ who chose to be poor, to be meek, to share our sorrow, to be a peacemaker and to suffer persecution for the sake of righteousness. And if we wish to become more Christ-like, we must then imitate Him by living out the beatitudes.

For the one who protests that holiness is beyond his reach, that holiness is for losers who seek to deny their humanity, who thinks that sanctity means virtue signalling, who believes that he is an incorrigible sinner beyond repair or redemption, he is making one of these declarations:

That redemption is a fantasy, which also means that our Lord died in vain and His mission was a failure;

That one doesn’t wish to follow Christ, for this is what becoming a saint means - becoming more Christ-like.

That this life is all there is to it, that there is no destiny prepared by God beyond a life of sin and strife; a destiny beyond our imagining - eternal life within the light and love of the Most Holy Trinity.

Acknowledging our vocation to become saints is not living in denial of our fallen nature and propensity to sin. We all fail, sometimes grievously. But, that is no reason to lower the bar of expectation. We seek forgiveness and reconciliation, and try again. Lowering the bar of spiritual and moral expectation demeans the faith and demeans us. Catholics today are capable of spiritual and moral grandeur, and indeed want to be called to that greatness. That is what Vatican II meant by the "universal call to holiness," and that is what is available to all of us in the Church, who dispenses graces through the sacraments.

Sanctity is available. And sanctity is what will transform a loser into a winner, a victim into a conqueror, a sinner into a saint. As Leon Bloy, the French Catholic novelist, so famously wrote: "The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint."