Inspiration from the Saints Read online

  Inspiration

  from the

  Saints

  Inspiration

  from the

  Saints

  • • •

  Stories from the Lives of

  Catholic Holy Men and Women

  Maolsheachlann

  Ó Ceallaigh

  Angelico Press

  First published in the USA

  by Angelico Press 2018

  Copyright © 2018 Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh

  All rights reserved:

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted,

  in any form or by any means, without permission

  For information, address:

  Angelico Press, Ltd.

  169 Monitor St.

  Brooklyn, NY 11222

  www.angelicopress.com

  978-1-62138-335-2 ppr

  978-1-62138-336-9 cloth

  978-1-62138-337-6 ebook

  Book and cover design

  by Michael Schrauzer

  This book is dedicated

  to my beloved wife Michelle.

  When I see your face,

  what I am looking at is home.

  Acknowledgements

  First of all, I would like to thank my beautiful wife Michelle, my muse and inspiration in this project as in all things.

  Secondly, I’d like to thank all my family for their help during the writing of this book, especially my father, who has always encouraged my writing.

  Thanks to the readers of my blog Irish Papist for all their suggestions for the book, and for their continued interest in my writing. Thanks also to Jonathan Barry and the other members of the Gothic Club, whose literary and artistic achievements have galvanized my own efforts. I look forward to many more slices of lemon drizzle cake, and many more discussions of great horror films and books.

  My friend Roger Buck contributed an incredible amount of time and attention to this project. I cannot thank him enough. I’m also indebted to Daniel Conneally for his interest and support, to Fr. Donncha Ó hAodha for his encouragement and help, and to Fr. Paul Stenhouse for his eagle eye and suggestions.

  The bulk of the research for this book was done in the Central Catholic Library, Dublin. Therefore I must thank all the staff and volunteers who make this unique resource available in the face of so many challenges.

  Thanks to the following individuals and companies for kindly allowing me permission to quote material:

  Glen Dallaire of the St. Gemma Galgani website.

  Darragh Redin of Veritas Publications.

  Libreria Editrice Vaticana, for various ecclesial documents.

  Fr. Paul Spencer CP for the photograph of St. Charles of Mount Argus.

  Thanks to ICS Publications for quotations from Story of a Soul, translated by John Clarke, O.C.D. Copyright (c) 1975, 1976, 1996 by Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites, ICS Publications, 2131 Lincoln Road, N.E. Washington, DC 20002-1199 U.S.A. www.icspublications.org

  Thanks to the Catholic Truth Society for Mary Craig’s passage on Maximilian Kolbe, whose original source is Blessed Maximilian Kolbe, Priest Hero of a Death Camp, Mary Craig, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1973.

  Thanks to The Word Among Us, 7115 Guilford Dr. #100, Frederick, MD 21704, for quotations from Mitch Finley’s The Rosary Handbook: A Guide for Newcomers, Old-Timers and Those in Between.

  Lastly, I must thank the subject of this book—the saints themselves. I ask them to pray for me, for everyone listed in these acknowledgments, and for everybody who reads this book!

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 Childhood

  2 Sinners

  3 Inspirations

  4 Boldness

  5 In Other People’s Eyes

  6 Mortification

  7 Marriage

  8 Family

  9 Chastity

  10 Losers

  11 Humility

  12 Catechetics

  13 Evangelization

  14 The Eucharist

  15 Prayer

  16 Mirth

  17 Death

  18 Afterword

  Appendix

  Introduction

  For most of my life I didn’t care very much about the saints. In fact, it would be truer to say that I didn’t care about them at all.

  Long before I realized that the first day of November was All Saints’ Day—the day that Catholics (and many other Christians) honor all the saints, including the countless saints who have never officially been proclaimed as such—I was much more excited about the evening that came before it: Halloween. I loved horror movies and spookiness and ghost stories. I still do. The lives of the saints, insofar as I was aware of them at all, seemed unspeakably dull.

  It took me a long time to realize that the very same thing that drew me to horror movies and spooky stories could be found, in a much greater concentration, in the lives of the Catholic saints. In fact, it was this same quality that drew me to nearly everything that ever excited me.

  What was this quality that drew me so? Otherworldliness is the best word I can think of to describe it—although “intensity,” “transfiguration,” “purity,” and many other words also apply.

  This is a book about Catholic saints, a book intended to inspire the reader with their stories and their words. But, since it’s a very personal book, I want to first describe my own journey from a complete lack of interest in the saints to a deep fascination with them. And, strange as it might sound, I think that a comparison between All Saints’ Day and Halloween, in terms of what they have meant to me through my life, may be the best way to do this.

  As most people know, the full name of Halloween is “The Eve of All Hallows,” and “All Hallows” is another name for “All Saints’ Day.” I grew up in Ireland, where I still live. Halloween, with all its monster masks, bonfires and fireworks, was a big deal in Ireland. Indeed, I didn’t realize until relatively recently that the celebration had its roots in my own country, in the pagan festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-wan). Samhain was a harvest festival, and a time when the boundary between the world of the living and the dead was supposed to become particularly thin—a time when the dead might be expected to wander into the world of the living.

  The idea that All Saints’ Day was invented to “replace” Samhain is just a myth—indeed, there was a time when All Saints’ Day was celebrated on the 13th of May. The relationship between the two days, and exactly how and why All Saints’ Day came to be celebrated on November 1st, is rather obscure. One way or another, the ancient pagan festival had borrowed its name from the Christian festival—but, in the popular mind (and certainly in my own mind), All Hallows was completely overshadowed by Halloween.

  One particular Halloween party that I attended when I was a little boy had a profound, lifelong effect on me—perhaps nothing in my entire life has ever had a bigger effect. It was quite a modest party, mostly full of children but with a good sprinkling of adults too. All the usual trappings of a Halloween party were present—fruit, nuts, sweets, and the curranty cake that the Irish call barmbrack. I remember some kids playing bob-the-apple, the game in which players try to catch an apple in a basin of water with their teeth. Most of the children were “dressed up” (which is the Irish term for fancy dress) in various costumes—I must have been too, though I don’t remember what I was “dressed up” as.

  Outside, the evening air crackled with fireworks. I remember listening to some older boys discussing the
various fireworks on display. It pleased me that there were actually different kinds of firework and that they had names. The firework whose name seemed most exotic to me, and which stirred my childish imagination in a way I can still vividly remember, was the “Catherine’s wheel.” It would be many, many years before I realized that it was named after a saint—St. Catherine of Alexandria, who was condemned to be martyred on an instrument called a spinning wheel (which broke up when she touched it—not that this saved her, since she was then simply beheaded).

  The thing that enthralled me was that this evening was so different. It was special. The suburb I lived in had been transformed—it seemed like a different place entirely. From that night on, I craved that same kind of specialness with an almighty craving. I yearned for special times and special places. Just as Halloween was all about spookiness, and Christmas was all about merry-making, I wanted everything to be all about something. I wanted atmosphere and distinctiveness and character. The situations I relished the most were those which seemed most special, most atmospheric.

  My first visit to the cinema was a good example. My parents took me and my brothers to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I wanted to see Star Trek: The Search for Spock, but I was told I wouldn’t like it. (I still regret this decision.) The dark, cavernous cinema, whose stuccoed ceilings and fancy upholstery seemed more elegant than anything I had ever seen before, was a world of its own—a world of drama, high emotion, and suspense.

  Other settings also gratified this yearning for specialness. The beach. The museum. The circus. The exotic glamour of my local Chinese restaurant. And whenever there was a decent snowfall (in the Ireland of the eighties, such occasions were all too rare), the whole city became a new and magical place.

  Of course, most of life wasn’t like this. Most of life was neither one thing nor the other—ordinary days filled with homework and routine, weather that was neither wintery nor summery, rooms and halls and streets that had no particular character of their own...no specialness. And, oh, how that depressed me!

  It wasn’t just places and times that I wanted to be special, and different, and full of character. I wanted the same thing to be true about people. In fact, I assumed that it was true about people, and my slow realization that this was not the case caused me no small amount of anguish. Children think that adults have all the answers. I certainly did. I may not have assumed that adults have all the right answers—after all, I couldn’t help noticing that they disagreed, so I knew they couldn’t all be right—but I expected they all had some kind of answers, right or wrong. I thought that every grown-up had a fully-worked-out theory of life, a grand philosophy. After all, they often acted as though they did. When they said things like, “When you’re my age, you’ll understand better,” that was the impression I got.

  And I wanted every grown-up to stand for something, as surely as Santa Claus stood for Christmas and the Grim Reaper stood for death. That young radical, with the sardonic grin and the cocked eyebrow—I wanted him to be the personification of everything that was irreverent, cynical and subversive. And that motherly teacher with the soft eyes—I wanted her to be the very embodiment of kindness, responsibility and maturity. If I heard the young radical express a commonplace opinion, or if I heard the motherly teacher make a crude joke, I was extremely put out.

  Of course, as I grew older, I began to realize—as every child realizes, sooner or later—that grown-ups weren’t really like this at all. Just like kids, they said things they didn’t mean. They went through phases and had moods. They claimed to know things that they didn’t really know. Worst of all, they were inconsistent. They were not the embodiment or personification of anything—just a bundle of contradictions.

  I didn’t realize then that there were exceptions to this rule—that there were some grown-ups who really were completely consistent. Fanatics were consistent. Obsessives were consistent. People who were completely dedicated to some single pursuit, whether it was poetry or mathematics or football, were consistent. Then again, such people tended to be consistent at the expense of a sense of humor, or a sense of perspective, or even sanity. And then there were the saints—the saints were consistent. But I didn’t know anything about the saints yet.

  So, since my longing for specialness and atmosphere and consistency were not satisfied by everyday life, where did I go looking for them? Well, in keeping with my love of Halloween, one of the places I went was the horror genre. In fact, I can’t remember a time I didn’t love the horror genre—horror movies, ghost stories, and all things spooky. I often hesitate to tell people that I am a horror fan, because it conjures up the wrong images. People have visions of chainsaws and gore and blood. That wasn’t really the sort of horror I loved. It was spooky horror I loved, and the whole atmosphere that went with it—crumbling castles, the howl of a wolf in the night, branches tapping at a window, a full moon, a pale face glimpsed in the corner of the mirror...

  When I watched a horror movie—as I often did with my two brothers, sitting on the couch with a blanket draped over our knees to hide under at the scariest parts—I was lost in a world that was saturated with an atmosphere all its own, a world where everything was transformed. In a horror movie, things that are entirely prosaic in ordinary life—a footstep, a shadow, a breeze—take on a whole new, menacing, thrilling aspect. The horror genre wasn’t the only place I sought refuge from the thinness of ordinary life. I also immersed myself in soccer, science fiction, poetry, movies—seeking in every one of them an intensity, a unity, a vividness of atmosphere that ordinary life lacked.

  All this time I had been more or less an atheist. I grew up in a Catholic family, and I went to Catholic school, but being a born skeptic I never took any of it very seriously. The older I grew, however, the more the famous words of St. Augustine described my plight: “Lord, you have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in You.” In my early thirties, I began to understand that my deepest hunger was for the sacred—for God. It took months and months of reading and investigation before I was convinced that God really existed, and that the way to find him was through the Catholic Church. So I began to pray the Rosary, and to read the Bible, and to go to Mass. The last especially was a revelation to me. I had been brought to Mass by my mother as a child, and I had hated it. But now, with my increasing hunger for God and the sacred, I lapped it up. In fact, I went as often as I could.

  That’s how, one Halloween, I found myself going to All Saints’ Day Vigil Mass for the first time—a Vigil Mass (of course) being the Mass which is held on the evening before a holy day. That afternoon, I had decided to watch a marathon of horror movies, to get into the Halloween atmosphere. I can remember that the movie entitled Halloween, the classic low-budget slasher that spawned a million imitators, was one of the three, but I don’t remember the others. Afterwards, I made my way to my local church. The neighborhood was full of trick-or-treaters. Fireworks exploded around me every few moments. I was in a very Halloweeny mood.

  The priest was robed in red vestments for the feast day (though white would have been more correct). The congregation was smaller than usual. The church, which I usually attended in morning light, seemed like a different place when it was lit entirely by artificial light. All of this—as well as the contrast with the revelry outside—made this Mass seem especially solemn and supernatural.

  And then there were the readings, which are some of the most powerful readings of the entire liturgical year. It seems a little irreverent to say so, but the readings for All Saints’ Day almost make this Mass seem like the climax of the Church’s calendar—even though that distinction properly belongs to Easter.

  The Gospel reading is the passage we call the Beatitudes (“Blessed are the poor in spirit...blessed are they who mourn...blessed are the meek...”), which is the heart of the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount itself might be termed the heart of Jesus’s teaching. But it wasn’t the Gospel
reading which captivated me the most, at that Mass. It was the reading from the Book of Revelation, the reading that describes the triumph of all God’s saints at the end of time:

  After this I had a vision of a great multitude,

  which no one could count,

  from every nation, race, people, and tongue.

  They stood before the throne and before the Lamb,

  wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands.

  They cried out in a loud voice:

  “Salvation comes from our God, who is seated on the throne,

  and from the Lamb.” (Revelation 7:9–10)

  What could be more epic than the scenario described in this passage? This was a vision of the end of every story, the climax of human history—of my own life and everybody’s life. This was how it was all going to end. This was the story that included every other story.

  And the figures in that “great multitude which no one could count, from every nation, race, people and country”—they would be the saints, the ones whose lives had been a success in the only way that ultimately mattered. They would be those who could say, like St. Paul, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7).

  The thought that kept running through my head was: so this is what Halloween had been about all along, without my realizing it! Halloween was The Eve of All Hallows! Obvious as it sounds, it was a revelation to me.

  Vampires, banshees, werewolves, zombies—none of the staples of horror movies were real. But the saints were real. The presence of Our Blessed Lord in the Eucharist was real. Heaven was real. The otherworldliness that had beckoned to me from the horror genre was only a fiction—but the true thing was here, in the Holy Sacrament of the Mass. It was what had been drawing me all along. In the real supernatural world, there was certainly horror—sin, and demons, and the danger of Hell. But there was also wonder, and awe—wonder and awe beyond anything I had glimpsed in any movie, or story, or poem.