The Saints
"We might ask ourselves: can we, with our limitations, with our weaknesses, aim so high? During the liturgical year, the Church invites us to commemorate a host of saints, the ones, that is, who lived charity to the full, who knew how to love and follow Christ in their daily lives. They tell us that it is possible for everyone to take this road. In every epoch of the Church’s history, on every latitude of the world map, the saints belong to all the ages and to every state of life, they are actual faces of every people, language and nation. And they have very different characters." - BXVI - 13.04.11
"Day after day the Church offers us the possibility of walking in the company of the saints. Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote that the saints constitute the most important message of the Gospel, its actualization in daily life, and therefore represent for us a real means of access to Jesus. The French writer Jean Guitton described them "as the colours of the spectrum in relation to light", because with their own tones and accentuations each one of them reflects the light of God's holiness. How important and useful, therefore, is the commitment to cultivate knowledge of and devotion to the saints, alongside daily meditation on the Word of God and filial love for Our Lady!
.. Their human and spiritual experience shows that holiness is not a luxury, it is not a privilege for the few, an impossible goal for an ordinary person; it is actually the common destiny of all men called to be children of God, the universal vocation of all the baptized. Holiness is offered to all; naturally, not all the saints are equal: in fact, as I said, they are the spectrum of divine light. Moreover, a saint who possesses extraordinary charisms is not necessarily a great saint. Indeed, there are a great many whose names are known only to God, because on earth they led an apparently perfectly normal life. And precisely these "normal" saints are those habitually desired by God. Their example testifies that only when we are in touch with the Lord can we be filled with his peace and his joy and be able to spread serenity, hope and optimism everywhere. Bernanos, a great French writer who was always fascinated by the idea of the Saints, - he mentions many in his novels - considering the variety of their charisms, notes that "every saint's life is like a new blossom in spring." May this also happen for us! Let us therefore permit ourselves to be attracted by the supernatural fascination of holiness! May Mary, Queen of all Saints, Mother and Refuge of sinners, obtain this grace for us!"
Benedict XVI - Catechesis, Wednesday, 20 August 2008 - in Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese & Spanish
Included here are the saints Papa Benedetto has spoken about in his Wednesday catecheses:
St Alphonsus Liguori, St Albert the Great, St Anthony of Padua, St Bonaventure, St Bridget of Sweden, St Catherine of Bologna, St Catherine of Genoa, St Catherine of Siena, St Clare of Assisi, St Dominic Guzman, St Elizabeth of Hungary, St Francis of Assisi, St Francis de Sales, St Gertrude the Great, St Hildegard of Bingen, St Joan of Arc, St John of the Cross, St John Eudes, St John Mary Vianney, St Joseph Cafasso, St Joseph Cottolengo, St Juliana of Cornillon, St Lawrence of Brindisi, St Leonard Murialdo, St Matilda of Hackeborn, St Maximilian Maria Kolbe, St Peter Canisius, St Pius X, St Robert Bellarmine, St Rose of Lima, St Stephen, St Tarcisius, St Teresa of Jesus, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, St Thérèse of the Child Jesus, St Thomas Aquinas & St Veronica Guiliani.
Other saints included on Totus2us's podcasts 3 2us and The Incredibles include:
St Catherine Labouré, St David, St Dominic Savio, St Francis Xavier, St Ignatius of Loyola, St John Fisher, St Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort, St Maria Goretti, St Margaret Clitherow, St Nicholas, St Nicholas Owen, St Noël Chabanel, St Padre Pio of Pietrelcina & St Thomas More
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3 2us on all the Saints
by Monsignor Leo Maasburg ♦
"The Church celebrates all saints - all the saints of all the centuries.. all those who have gone to heaven through the grace of God. Sanctity, Mother Teresa once said, is not the privilege of the few, sanctity is the simple duty for you and me, we have all been created for that. That is her view and she echoes very well what the Second Vatican Council tells us: the common call to sanctity. .. Of course none of us can live the virtues but we all can open up to the guidance, to the strengthening, to the counselling of the Holy Spirit. We all can open up to start on a way of sanctity, because sanctity is not the point which we have reached and from them on we can see halos on our heads or are lifted 1 yard up above the others, but sanctity is the path and it is the narrow path into the kingdom of God. It is a path which Jesus says is comparable to the eye of a needle - it cannot be found by ourselves. It is very difficult for ourselves to enter the kingdom of heaven but what for us is impossible, for God is possible. So sanctity has a lot to do with us being linked closely to God. And how do we get linked to God? By the means by which the Holy Spirit guides us and the Church teaches us; it is very simple. It is by getting into silence first, into the silence of our hearts. God speaks in the silence of our hearts .. The first step for getting in touch with God would be to kneel down or sit in a Church and say 'Lord, what do you want me to do?' and He will clearly answer 'I want you to be a saint' .. Our vocation is to walk, to walk a path of holiness under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in His Church."
The Martyr
Dear Brothers and Sisters, today in the Liturgy we commemorate St Clare of Assisi, Foundress of the Poor Clares, a luminous figure. But this week we are commemorating several holy martyrs, from the early centuries of the Church such as St Lawrence, Deacon, St Pontianus, Pope, and St Hippolytus, Priest; and from the nearer past, such as St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein, Patroness of Europe, and St Maximilian Mary Kolbe. I would then like to reflect briefly on martyrdom, a form of total love for God.
On what is martyrdom founded? The answer is simple: on the death of Jesus, on his supreme sacrifice of love, consummated on the Cross, that we might have life. Christ is the suffering servant mentioned by the Prophet Isaiah, who gave himself as a ransom for many. He urges his disciples, each one of us, to take up his or her cross every day and follow him on the path of total love of God the Father and of humanity: "he who does not take his cross and follow me", he tells us, "is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it" (Mt 10: 38-39). It is the logic of the grain of wheat that dies in order to sprout and bring new life. Jesus himself "is the grain of wheat which came from God, the divine grain that lets itself fall to the ground, that lets itself sink, be broken down in death and precisely by so doing germinates and can thus bear fruit in the immensity of the world" (Benedict XVI during his Visit to the Evangelical Lutheran Community, Rome, 14 March 2010). The martyr follows the Lord to the very end, freely accepting death for the salvation of the world in a supreme test of love and faith (cf Lumen Gentium, n 42).
Once again, where does the strength to face martyrdom come from? From deep and intimate union with Christ, because martyrdom and the vocation to martyrdom are not the result of human effort but the response to a project and call of God, they are a gift of his grace that enables a person, out of love, to give his life for Christ and for the Church, hence for the world. If we read the lives of the martyrs we are amazed at their calmness and courage in confronting suffering and death: God's power is fully expressed in weakness, in the poverty of those who entrust themselves to him and place their hope in him alone. Yet it is important to stress that God's grace does not suppress or suffocate the freedom of those who face martyrdom; on the contrary it enriches and exalts them: the Martyr is an exceedingly free person, free as regards power, as regards the world; a free person who in a single, definitive act gives God his whole life, and in a supreme act of faith, hope and charity, abandons himself into the hands of his Creator and Redeemer; he gives up his life in order to be associated totally with the Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. In a word, martyrdom is a great act of love in response to God's immense love.
Dear brothers and sisters, we are probably not called to martyrdom, but not one of us is excluded from the divine call to holiness, to attain the high standard of Christian living, and this entails taking up our daily cross. All of us, especially in our time when selfishness and individualism seem to prevail, must take on as a first and fundamental commitment the duty to grow every day in greater love for God and for our brothers and sisters, to transform our own lives and thereby transform the life of our world too. Through the intercession of the Saints and Martyrs let us ask the Lord to set our hearts on fire so that we may be able to love as he has loved each one of us.
Benedict XVI - in Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese & Spanish + video
General Audience - 11 August 2010 - © Copyright 2010 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana