It's as if Christmas Eve eclipsed Christmas Day: Halloween has become better known than the holy day it's named after. Halloween is just a contraction of “All Hallow's Evening.” It refers to “All Hallows' Day,” the old name for All Saints Day. Celebrated since the late 4th century, All Saints Day reminds us of how important the saints used to be. Statues and icons of them were found in most churches. Prayers were made to them. The saints became specialized, with each having an efficacy over certain areas of life. Thus if you wanted protection against fire or lumbago, you prayed to St. Lawrence of Rome. If you were a sailor, you might pray to St. Elmo. If you had disappointing children you prayed to St. Clotilde. Pilgrims went to shrines of saints. Bits of their bodies were venerated. How did this state of affairs come about and why do we on the 1st of November have a holy day devoted to all the saints?
The word “saint” in the Bible meant someone set apart by God for his purposes. So in the New Testament, all Christians are called saints. (Acts 9:32; Romans 1:7; 1Corinthians 1:2; Ephesians 1:1, etc) All were saved by Christ and set apart by God to live by his Spirit and spread the gospel. But as time went on, the apostles were considered saints with a capital S, especially since most of them became martyrs. “Martyr” is just the Greek word for “witness,” someone who testifies to the truth. In the early days of the church, testifying to the truth of Jesus as the risen Messiah and Savior could, in times of persecution, get you killed by the authorities. So the term martyr took on the added meaning of someone who dies for the truth. You can see how the first Christians, those who died for the faith, came to be honored as superstars of the church.
Not only were many of the apostles martyred, but so were many of their successors, whom they had appointed to oversee the church. The Greek word for “overseer” is episkopos, from which we get the word “bishop.” Originally a bishop was one of many elders of a house church. He was chosen to preside over the Eucharist (Communion) and baptisms. As the faith spread and the number of churches in the bishop's city grew, so did his jurisdiction. But he couldn't visit all of them every Sunday so he ordained (which means “listed”) elders to act in his stead. The Greek word for elder is presbyteros, which eventually became the word “priest.”
One of the most famous martyr bishops was St. Ignatius of Antioch. Antioch was the site of the first major church founded outside Judea. It was the church that sent Paul out as a missionary. (Acts 11:26; 13:1-3) Under the emperor Trajan (reigned 98-117 AD), the first one to make Christianity an illegal religion, Ignatius was arrested. As he was transported to Rome, a trip that took months, Ignatius wrote a series of letters to various churches. Seven of those letters still survive. In them he offered encouragement and corrected theological errors and contemplated his approaching death. What is remarkable is his anticipation of his martyrdom. He even writes to the church at Rome not to try to prevent his execution, which will deliver him to God. This is alien to us but Ignatius was not alone in seeing martyrdom as a glorious goal. It was seen as following in the footsteps of Jesus, the ultimate form of discipleship. The alternative was to deny one's faith or hide it from others. So Ignatius embraced his martyrdom. One can see how this heroic stance impressed other Christians.
So the first capital S saints were martyrs. And not all of them were bishops. Ordinary people who stood up for their faith and were executed were also designated saints. However, when the emperor Constantine made Christianity a legal religion in the year 313, martyrdom was largely a thing of the past, unless you were a missionary to the barbarians. So the term “saint” was bestowed on any extremely holy or charitable Christian. Such a person was held up as an example to other Christians. As the faith spread, every region could boast at least one superstar Christian who was designated a saint by local churches and bishops.
When the faith spread outside the cities, it came to the pagans. The word “pagan” originally meant a rural peasant, just as “heathen” used to simply mean someone who lived on the heath, or uncultivated land. Since Christianity first spread from city to city along the excellent roads of the Roman empire, the first Christians were usually urban. Rural people were considered, then as now, less sophisticated and, at that time, more barbaric. (Which is why “villain” derives from the word for a farm servant, one who works on a villa.) Rural people were also more conservative, not willing to change their ways, which meant still holding onto the polytheistic faith of the old Roman pantheon. Agricultural life is hard and they had a difficult time giving up reliance on the gods of the harvest and the rain and fertility. How could one God do it all?
Rural folk also saw the spiritual realm as set up in much the same kind of hierarchy as the empire, where the local landlords and officials were the only contacts one had with authority. Most would never lay eyes on the emperor. In the same way, there may be one supreme god like Zeus or Jupiter, but you usually dealt with the lesser gods who were in charge of the particular departments of life that were your everyday concerns, like safe childbirth or good weather. The idea of having direct access to God Almighty was a strange and probably a frightening one. It would be like a local matter going all the way to the emperor himself. The idea of going through intermediaries was more comfortable. So the form of Christianity that developed in those parts was one where the saints took over for the old gods and took up specialized oversight for the common concerns of the peasants, who vastly outnumbered city dwellers.
Sometimes it was a stretch to connect a saint with some activity, illness or profession and so their lives were ransacked for any link, however tenuous. So if you were a wheelwright, a craftsman working with wheels, your patron saint was St. Catherine of Alexandria, presumably because she was sentenced to be tortured and broken on the wheel. If there wasn't an appropriate saint for the occasion, a pious legend might supply one. My favorite is St. Wigglesfoot the Unencumbered. There were many tales of Christian virgins who prayed to God to protect them from lustful pagan princes. In the case of St. Wilgefortis, God supposedly caused her to grow a mustache and beard overnight. The next day was to be her wedding day but she was rejected by her groom. So St. Wilgefortis, whose name devolved into St. Wigglesfoot, became the patron saint of women who wanted to get rid of their troublesome husbands!
It is said that sometimes a popular local deity was merely “baptized” and reborn as a saint, so to speak. St. Brigid of Ireland may have been a pagan princess converted by St. Patrick. Or she may have been the powerful pagan goddess repurposed. Or the attributes of the goddess and the real woman might have been mixed together in popular lore. In this and other alleged instances of pagan gods turned into saints, it's tough to know for sure since the stories predate writing in most cases. Often our knowledge of certain pagan gods are only available to us because they were written down by Christians in the same way the story of Beowulf was. We know that pagan shrines were often cleansed and repurposed as churches. Was the same done to the former object of worship?
Another reason for the mixing up of at least the functions of the old gods and those of the saints was the incomplete conversion of barbarian tribes. Often what happened was that the missionaries managed to convert the king or tribal chieftain, who would then decree that all his subjects were to be baptized and become Christians. The average member of the tribe was not doing this out of personal conviction and often was in near total ignorance of the tenets of the newly mandated faith. Again, letting go of familiar gods was hard and so the saints were substituted for them in the hearts and minds of these new “converts.” Certainly the spirit of Christianity was often lost when the outer forms of the faith were adopted by tribes whose chief characteristics were the virtues of warriors, not peacemakers. A lot of the problems of the so-called “Dark Ages” did not originate with the church but with the breaking up of the Roman empire into a roiling mass of warring tribes who did not care much for learning the gentler teachings of Jesus.
Eventually the cult of saints degenerated into regional veneration of certain persons whose bodies were considered to be imbued with holiness and miraculous powers. Though some saints were merely great teachers or preachers or charitable souls who helped the poor and suffering, miracles became the primary signature of sainthood. And if the saint didn't display any wonder-working power in this life, then he or she might suddenly manifest this ability after death. He could do this by granting cures to those who pray to him. Or he might do this by simply refusing to rot. If you wish to see how powerful this phenomenon was, google “incorruptible saints” and look at the images. They aren't creepy because they look like they are merely sleeping. At a time when the art of embalming was lost, you can see how a body that did not decompose inspired awe.
The problem was the saints were superstars and like Elvis and Graceland, they attracted pilgrims. And pilgrims brought money. People would pay good money to see and have their prayers offered to a saint. There weren't enough saints to go around so monasteries and churches competed for relics, which were often bits of the saint's bodies.
The cult of the saints became a prime target for the Protestant reformers. The trafficking in saints literally commercialized the sacred, cheapened the idea of God's grace and put a price tag on answers to prayer. In addition, saints were seen, at best, as the objects of superstition and at worst, as objects of idolatrous worship. The whole idea that through Christ we have access to God was lost when people's primary religious devotions were directed at secondary figures of the faith. The church even said that asking a saint to pray for you was akin to asking a fellow Christian to pray for you. Of course, it was felt that since a saint was extraordinarily virtuous, this was like having cash in the heavenly bank, and being continuously in the presence of God gave the saints a much better chance of getting what they asked for than just having your neighbor pray for you. To the reformers, the cult of the saints was basically paganism redux. In addition, people like Henry VIII found it very profitable to denounce the practice and to seize the property and money of monasteries who made a mint out of the saints. Many beautiful works were destroyed in the zeal to purify churches. And few Protestant churches are named for saints, nor do they talk about them much. Unfortunately, that means they don't tell the stories of some truly remarkable Christians.
If we look at the saints as they were originally seen by the early church, as exemplars of Christian living, we can find a lot to appreciate. A former slave, St. Vincent de Paul started organizations for the poor, nursed the sick, and found jobs for the unemployed. St. Rose Venerini founded and oversaw 40 schools for girls despite violent opposition to them being educated. St. Richard Pampuri was a doctor who treated the poor for free, even setting up a dental clinic for them. St. Bridget of Sweden was the mother of 8, one of whom became a saint as well, and yet Bridget found the time to be a counselor of theologians, popes and royalty. St. Raymond of Penyafort gave up law and refused to be made an archbishop to do parish work instead and to start a school teaching the culture and languages of Spain and Northern Africa to missionaries. The first book written in English by a woman came from St. Julian of Norwich, who was widely recognized as a spiritual authority and who wrote of God's love at a time when the world was rocked by the Black Death and peasant revolts. St. Francis of Assisi was a spoiled rich kid and soldier who renounced his inheritance and tried to end the 5th crusade by going to Egypt and speaking to the sultan. There is a wealth of stories of heroic faith to be had here.
So let us reclaim the saints, their extraordinary lives and the lessons in faith and service they can teach us. But let us also remember that we too are saints, people saved and sanctified by God. We too serve him, even if we don't always get noticed. The hallmark of saints is not miracles but humility. The greatest of the capital S saints would admit that they could accomplish nothing without the grace of God. They all realized that they were ordinary sinners, rescued by God and called to imitate Jesus Christ and continue his work. If they are different from us it is perhaps the extent to which they put God before self and the needs of others before their own. To paraphrase Dag Hammarskjold, saints are those who say “Thanks” to God for all he has done and “Yes” to all he will do. To be a saint, then, is to decide which voice to listen to, your own or Christ's, and which you will obey.
What is Jesus saying to you right now, right here? What are you going to do about it?
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