In the New Testament, the term “saints” or “holy ones” is used to refer to all faithful Christians. In Philippians 1:1, Paul sends his greetings to “all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, with the bishops and deacons” (RSV).
He ends the same letter with the following instruction: “Greet every saint in Christ Jesus. The brethren who are with me greet you. All the saints greet you, especially those of Caesar's household” (Phil 4:21-22).
So, think for a moment that, already in the middle of the first century, there were saints, as the notes in the New Jerusalem Bible state, “in the service of the emperor, either in Rome or in…the chief towns of the empire.” Saints are found in unlikely places and occupations. And that is the point of the massive numbers of beatifications and canonizations that have taken place under John Paul II: saints are all around us. The pope has made a special effort to recognize the sanctity of ordinary people and married people, not just the sanctity of clergy or religious. We must learn to see others and, yes, even ourselves, with the eyes of the pope.
We speak of canonized saints as having lived lives of heroic virtue. We see heroic virtue whenever we see parents lovingly caring for their severely disabled children. We see heroic virtue when we hear, as I recently did, of a woman who was raped but refused an abortion. We certainly see heroic virtue when young soldiers risk their lives for the sake of establishing peace and order for people in other nations.
All of us have been or will be called to some aspect of heroic virtue — it is an inevitable prospect in a fallen world. It will most likely not be so outwardly noticeable or dramatic as in well-known cases, but it is a call to heroic virtue all the same. Many marriages call for such virtue on a daily basis, just as many parishes call for heroic virtue and endurance by their pastors and parishioners on a daily basis. If you know the dynamics of parish life, you know what I mean.
As Catholics, we must remember that formal beatification and canonization is a process required, as the old Catholic Encyclopedia says, for public veneration. But, in many ways, we are called to recognize privately the sanctity around us in the unknown saints of ordinary life. That recognition will spur the ordinary saints around us to perseverance and to greater holiness and will also spur us to personal holiness as a form of emulation — as emphasized, by the way, in traditional Jesuit education. For as Vatican II declared, the call to holiness is for all of us in all jobs and in all situations. The world is not so bleak a place, in spite of all its deep problems, that we do not come across some shining lights in our daily lives. We should not miss them. They are there for a purpose. Christ has surrounded us with saints.
Oswald Sobrino’s daily columns can be found at the Catholic Analysis website. He is a graduate lay student at Detroit’s Sacred Heart Major Seminary. He recently published Unpopular Catholic Truths, a collection of apologetic essays, available on the Internet here.
