Do We Need Any More Saints ?

Abstract

In the true sense of the word of course there can never be enough saints. Luther, I have heard, said that the only thing that matters is to be a saint. Simone Weil is even more uncompromising: “it seems to me that saintliness is. if I dare say so, the minimum for a Christian” (Seventy Letters, ed. Rees, 1965, p. 175). It is simply a linguistic oddity that English and German among others have tended to separate the word ‘saint’ or its equivalent from ‘holy’, whereas the Romance languages keep one word to describe the holy person and to mark out those whose saintliness the Church has formally recognised. In England the word may even take on a dismissive air: one hears from time to time the quite unashamed remark. “I don't pretend to be a saint”, as if unsaintliness were a perfectly reasonable and acceptable state of mind, which we can in any case do nothing about, a condition perhaps that one has been born with, as who should say, “I don't pretend to be very clever’’. A booklet published by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul innocently answers the question whether its members are “near-saints’’: “Certainly not. God knows, they are ordinary Catholics, real men who (let it be said with the utmost humility) are trying to do God’s will”. Saints as are of course extraordinary—that is why we feel we need a special word for them; and I suggest that part of their difference is in their greater human reality, or rather that they are more fully human (whole) by being holy.