Of sinners & saints and sometimes both. (Of Several Minds).

When she was told that many people considered her a saint, Dorothy Day famously said, "I won't be dismissed that easily." People put a distance between themselves and saints: Saints are different; they aren't like us. You hear things like, "I'm no saint, I'm only human"--as if saints were sinless, and we were not obliged to take our baptism all that seriously. But when Paul's epistles mention the saints, they refer to the living, the people who are in the messy process of being made holy.

The cult of the saints as we know them--those set aside by the church as examples of life in Christ--began with the earliest martyrs, who had certainly proved their wholeheartedness. As the church became legal and martyrs therefore less likely, sainthood was applied to those who were exemplary in other ways. The reputation of locally renowned saints gradually spread, and the larger church acknowledged their goodness. Eventually, other specific criteria were introduced: not only a life lived well on earth, but miracles--cures, usually--following the saint's death.

I like the idea, found in the Western church, of the devil's advocate. It's a good idea to have a kind of prosecutor, who offers all the best reasons to think that perhaps this person was not so great after all. John Paul II has eliminated this aspect of the canonization process, which sure makes things easier for the cause of Pius IX.

The process, in both the Eastern and Western churches, has never been free of politics. The earliest layer of the process--someone locally renowned, whose reputation for holiness rises into the larger church--still exists, but it has been joined by more organized lobbying efforts (monasteries and religious orders pushing their candidates actively) or choices made from above. Popes and prelates choose to make saints of people whose lives underscore themes they find important: obedience, in a time when authority is questioned, or chastity in a time which seems lascivious, or more loyalty to the church, when people are more inclined to be loyal to king or emperor.

My own Orthodox jurisdiction has canonized Alexis Toth (1845-1909) of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He was a Ruthenian Catholic priest who led thousands of Eastern-rite Catholics into the Orthodox Church. This followed the refusal of Archbishop John Ireland (1838-1918) to allow Toth to serve his people: Father Toth, whose wife had died, would scandalize the faithful because he had been married. (It could be argued that Archbishop Ireland should be made a saint of the Orthodox Church, if results are what you are looking for. If not for him, there would be many fewer Orthodox parishes in this country.)

I was led to think about saints by a curious route: I was on a Mark Twain binge, and came across his 1904 essay on Joan of Arc. She fascinated many intellectuals and artists around that time, and a little later; Carl Dreyer's silent film remains remarkably powerful, and George Bernard Shaw was a fan. What is interesting about Twain's essay is that it comes from the man whose bitter books The Mysterious Stranger and Letters from the Earth argue a case against Christianity. At first I thought that Twain was using Joan as a stick with which to beat the French. They weren't his favorite people. In Man's Place in the Animal World, Twain wrote, "Man is but little lower than the angels. This definitely locates him. He is between the angels and the French." But Twain is rhapsodic: "She is the Wonder of the Ages.... It is beyond us. All the rules fail in this girl's case. In the world's history she stands alone--quite alone.... There is no blemish in that rounded and beautiful character ... she is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced." And he makes a moving argument to that effect.

Two things come to mind. One is that Twain isn't alone in his contradictions. I have seen reflexively antireligious people forced to a newer, wider opinion of religion when confronted with the examples of Bonhoeffer and Gandhi. Another is that the Catholic Church, which killed Joan in 1431, canonized her in 1920--perhaps because it was recognized that, given the interest of intellectuals in her case, she could be used as an argument against the church. By acknowledging her as a saint, the church could show that it was capable not only of recognizing a saint, but also of recognizing its own tragic errors.

The veneration of saints is a good thing, but it might be healthier to return to Paul's use of the word. Hagiographers point up the saints' wonderful qualities, and play into the hands of those who want to keep saints at a comfortable distance. It helps me to know that Therese of Lisieux suffered from depression. Mother Maria of Paris, who died in one of Hitler's camps for helping Jews and others during the Vichy regime, will probably be canonized by the Orthodox Church. I like the fact that she found fasting onerous, and could never bring herself to give up smoking. The saints challenge us more when we see how ordinary, not how wonderful, they were.