Not Just One Patron Saint

RCIA Assignment

I'd be remiss if I did not share one of the exercises that I did with the RCIA group I talked to the night before Halloween. That night, I gave a presentation on the Communion of Saints. If you'd like to learn more about what I talked about then I recommend reading the post I wrote about that a couple of days ago. Anyway, that night I challenged the group do some homework by researching their patron saints. I told them they didn't just have one patron saint, but potentially three.

Three Part Process

The assignment is a three part process. First, I instructed them to look up the saint whose name they shared. Now I know that in this day and age many people don't have Christian names, but I figured for most part most do. If they don't have an explicitly Christian name, the next thing is to choose a name that is closely associated with one. For example, the name Jessica is not a biblical name but is thought to be associated with the name Joanna. OK, the next part of the exercise required that they look up the patron saint whose feast day falls on their birthday. I shared that I did this very exercise myself years ago when I first taught the Communion of Saints to RCIA. As a result of this, I discovered that St. Albert the Great is the saint whose feast day is celebrated on November 15th. He is the patron saint of teachers and I happen to be a teacher. Discovering that for the first time was pretty special. Needless to say, I think looking up your birthday saint is the most fun and potentially eye opening. The final part of the assignment is for them to research potential names they would take for confirmation. While we are not required to take on a saint name during confirmation, I encourage candidates and Catechumens to do so, especially since many don't already have Christian names. I think this gives them one more personal connection to the Communion of Saints and give them a saint to lean on during tough time. If you have already been confirmed, I still encourage you to do further reading on your patron saint.

Patron Saint Resources:

Here are a few websites for looking up patron saints by date or cause:

• American Catholic
• EWTN Saints and Holy People
• Saints SQPN

Give It a Shot

The point of doing this exercise is to demonstrate that we could potentially have up to 3 saints to connect with and call upon for intercessory prayer I just think this is a fun way get people to actively be thinking about the communion of saints and how they are already part of the Church Militant. Give it a shot let me know how it goes.

The Communion of Saints

The Holy Ones
Saints are "holy ones" who have led a life in union with God through the grace of Christ and received the reward of eternal life. In other words, they have made it to Heaven.

Communion of Saints

The Church is called the Communion of Saints, of the Holy Ones. (See the Catechism). The Communion of Saints is made up of three parts: Church Triumphant - those who have made it to Heaven; Church Militant - those who continue the "fight" towards holiness here on Earth; and Church Suffering - those who are being purified in Purgatory

The Church Community
The saints in heaven offer to God the prayers of the saints (in progress) on earth. We call this intercessory prayer (See section below). St. John saw that "the twenty-four elders [the leaders of the people of God in heaven] fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints" (Rev. 5:8). The members of the Church on Earth pray for the souls in purgatory (CCC, 958). In Maccabees, the sacred writer proclaims "And because he considered that they who had fallen asleep with godliness bad great grace laid up for them. It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins.”(Emphasis added; 2 Macc 12:45, Vulgate).

Honor v.s. Worship
I told a story comparing the honoring of saints as role models in our lives to my emulation of Fred Lynn when I was a young (and much thinner) baseball player. I continued the analogy in describing kids today who collect sports bobbleheads of their favorite players. When we keep statues of Saints we don't worship the statue, but they do serve as reminders of the lives they led, in particular opening themselves to the will of God. I concluded the metaphor by drawing the similarities between collecting baseball cards and keeping prayer cards.

In a nutshell - Saints are our role models during the before and after periods of their lives. In other words, they have been there and done that. If God can take those people (and some of them were scumbags before their conversions) and turn them into saints, then there must be hope for me and you. For some, the thought of imitating a human saint is more accessible than being Jesus because after all, He is God. God, in his infinite wisdom understood we would need earthly role models to follow. The Communion of Saints is another of God's gifts of love.

Intercessory Prayer

We often join prayer chains and ask our friends to pray for us and loved ones. We all know someone we consider a prayer warrior who is a constantly praying for others successfully. Sometimes we may even think they have a hotline to God. In short, we are accustomed to asking others to pray for us now. This is precisely what we do when we ask the saints to pray for us.

"[An] angel came and stood at the altar [in heaven] with a golden censer; and he was given much incense to mingle with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar before the throne; and the smoke of the incense rose with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God" (Rev. 8:3–4).

In particular, we should ask the intercession of those Christians in heaven, who have already had their sanctification completed, for "[t]he prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects" (Jas. 5:16).

Relics and Statues

The use of the bones of Elisha brought a dead man to life: "So Elisha died, and they buried him. Now bands of Moabites used to invade the land in the spring of the year. And as a man was being buried, lo, a marauding band was seen and the man was cast into the grave of Elisha; and as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood on his feet" (2 Kgs. 13:20-21). This is an unequivocal biblical example of a miracle being performed by God through contact with the relics of a saint!

Similar are the cases of the woman cured of a hemorrhage by touching the hem of Christ’s cloak (Matt. 9:20-22) and the sick who were healed when Peter’s shadow passed over them (Acts 5:14-16). "And God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them" (Acts 19:11-12).

CANONIZATION: 
When a person is canonized as a saint, a solemn declaration is issued by the Pope that a deceased member of the faithful may be proposed as a model and intercessor to the Christian faithful and venerated as a saint on the basis of the fact that the person lived a life of heroic virtue or remained faithful to God through martyrdom (CCC 828 and 957).

There are four stages in the process towards sainthood:

• Servant of God - when their cause is opened
• Venerable - Pope recognizes the heroic virtue of the person
• Blessed - once one miracle has been established to be attributable to the person's intercession
• Saint - 2 miracles and then canonized; public prayer to the Saint then permitted

For a more detailed account visit EWTN's article on the subject.

FURTHER READING:

• Voices of the Saints, Bert Ghezzi
• My Best Teachers Were Saints, Susan H. Swetnam
• Lives of the Saints
• My Life with the Saints, Father James Martin, SJ

RCIA Talk Part 2: My Life with the Saints

I shared a few stories of saints who have helped me in my journey to answer God's call.  Here I will only mention three: St. Paul, St. Josemaria, and Blessed John XXIII.

St. Paul

My earliest recollection of admiring a saint involves St. Paul. When I was a freshman in high school ABC aired a two-part mini-series entitled Peter and Paul, starring Anthony Hopkins as St. Paul. Hopkins portrayed St. Paul as a remarkable preacher. This inspired me to read the epistles of St. Paul. 

Later I would volunteer to be a lector at St. Cecilia Catholic Church in Dallas. I would always try and get the second reading so I could read a letter from St. Paul. Now as an adult, I still find myself thinking of Anthony Hopkins' St. Paul when I read one of St. Paul's letters at mass.

St. Josemaria Escriva

About seven years ago I experienced a reconversion that led me through a significant formation process. I truly experienced the awareness, renewal and dialogue found in the teaching of Ecclesiam suam, Pope Paul VI's encyclical written during Vatican II. I had become conflicted about living my "Sunday life" separate from my every-other-day-life. I mistakenly thought I needed to leave my profession as a teacher to serve God in a greater capacity. I was also looking for a saint to help me find congruence in my work and spiritual life. 

The entire time I was searching for this saint, I kept stumbling upon the writings of St. Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei. Ironically this coincided with the popularity of the Brown's DaVinci Code, which painted the Catholic Church and Opus Dei in a false negative light. Eventually I read The Way, St. Josemaria's most famous written work. In it, I found the precise message I was looking for: we are all God's children and we are ALL called to holiness, even in our ordinary work. I had found the saint I was looking for. Since then, I have become a Cooperator of Opus Dei and I begin each day of prayer reading a passage from St. Josemaria's writings.

Blessed John XXIII

For the last fifteen years, I have struggled with my weight. I went from being a fit cyclist to an obese couch potato (you are indeed what you eat).  Recently, I had a series of events which inspired me to take a more spiritual approach to my weight loss. Like my search for a saint of the ordinary, I was looking for a patron saint for obese people or weight loss. I could not find one recognized by Church tradition. Other suitable candidates like St. Maximillian Kolbe (because the Nazi's tried to starve him to death) and St. Thomas Aquinas (because he may have been a large man) came to mind. 

Instead, I decided Blessed John XXIII would be the patron I ask for intercessory help. I even took a picture of a statue of him we have in our sanctuary and use it as my iPhone wallpaper. I have lost over 50 pounds since I incorporated prayer into my weight loss plan (Weight Watchers has helped too). I must admit I have not read much about him, but what I do know, I have enjoyed. He was funny, friendly and, most importantly, he convoked the Council of Vatican II.

These are just a few of the saints who have helped me along the way. Some have inspired me by their writings. Others have been role models and still others I have asked for intercessory prayer.

Part 3 of this series will include a discussion of Fun Facts about the saints.

RCIA Talk Part 1: Communion of Saints

 Some rights reserved by Zeetz Jones

This Sunday I spoke on the Communion of Saints to the RCIA group at St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church in Carrollton, Texas.  This is one of my favorite topics to teach because by reflecting on the lives of saints, we draw inspiration and hope from these living examples of faith.  In addition to their intercessory prayer, this is precisely why they are helpful to our own spiritual development.  What follows are the highlights from the talk.


CCC
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) teaches that the Communion of Saints is the Church (#946). More specifically, the CCC teaches that the Communion of Saints is made up of the souls in heaven (Church Triumphant), those on Earth still fighting the fight - sometimes with ourselves (Church Militant) - and the purifying souls in Purgatory (Church Suffering).


Role Models 
The Saints - the Holy Ones - are our spiritual role models. They provide us with real life examples of people who faced similar challenges and overcame them through the grace of God. Although there are a number of saints who lived the totality of their lives has "holy people" most did not. Most were like me and you - every day sinners trying to make their way through life. This is why it important to read  the lives of the saints, to get the complete before and after picture. For me, reading about someone like St. Augustine - the Charlie Sheen of his day - gives me hope. What makes the saints different is that they humbled themselves to accept the will of God and live is His love.  This is what we are called to do right now: submit to will of God, answer His call to holiness and share His love with others.  This does not mean we have to be preachers on street corners. What it really means (and I think this is more difficult) is to be friends to those we work and live with. They will know we are Christians by our love! "By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another." (John 13:35)


This post was getting lengthy so I am going to break it up into three parts. Part Two will be My Life with the Saint, in which I talked about a few of the saints that have helped me in my spiritual journey.


For now, we pray for the intercession of St. Augustine, St. Joseph and all Holy Men and Women of God. Amen!