From Mr R. P. Cachia

What does a man of the spiritual calibre of Pietro of Morrone, a mystic of the first order, who was dragged from his cave up in the Apennines to be made Pope Celestine V against his will and later made to resign, have in common with the likes of Vincent Ferrer, a fiery, aggressive Dominican, who travelled across Spain with cross in hand followed by a band of torturers and hooligans, terrifying whole villages and towns into repentance and whipping up hatred of Jews and Moors? Nothing, of course, except that both form part of the Company of Saints!

The Company of Saints is made up of the most unlikely of bedfellows: the solid armchair theologian Thomas Aquinas rubs shoulders with his near contemporary, the half naked beggar Francis of Assisi, whose followers were persecuted by the very Church Thomas so staunchly defended. Theresa of Calcutta, who went out to help the poor, sits near Simeon the Stylite who climbed up a column because he hated the company of men and lived on top of it for the rest of his life.

It also admits characters who were bestowed sainthood without their working for it: Helena started out as a barmaid, became the concubine of a Roman Augustus and ended up the official imperial archaeologist in Palestine in her later years. She was sainted principally because she was Constantine the Great’s mother. Mary Magdalene was a street girl whose major merit was that she fell in love with the master himself and Simon Peter was just a simple uneducated Galilean fisherman who followed and betrayed Jesus but ended up being revered as the unlikely head of the Roman church.

The roads to heaven are various and often diametrically opposite and even paved with dubious intentions: some saints like Ignatius Loyola and Dominic of Gusman spent their life fighting for the imposition of clerical authority, at the price of savage inquisition and torture over free belief, whereas most early Christian martyrs died for fomenting what we would nowadays call sedition against a pluralistic Roman State which tolerated free belief.

However, there is one thing saints do share in common: they never stand up to the authority of the Catholic Church. Sainthood, whatever its nature, has always had a high price to pay: obedience.

Paul of Tarsus might have fought a running battle of nerves with the Jerusalem elders led by James the Elder, whom he openly flouted over letting pagans become Christians without circumcision. But this was the very beginning of the story and everyone was finding his feet after the death of Jesus. There was no institution called the Church back then because the first bishops refused to give primacy to anyone of their colleagues. The Church was still federal and democratic so orthodoxy was simply a question of which ideas became mainline doctrine and which lost out.

But after Constantine, there would be no more fiddling with allegiances: you were either orthodox or you were out. And this attitude became crystallized as the rule for the whole duration of Christendom: you might be saintly but if you challenged the authority of Rome you were given the cold shoulder, or anathemised or, worse still, ignored completely.

The Marian martyrs were fervent Christians who died at the stake because they upheld the claims of Protestantism against the claims of Rome on the political allegiance of Englishmen. The Elizabethan martyrs were likewise fervent Christians but they died defending that same Roman hegemony and were declared saints for it by various popes during the 1900s. The Marians, so to speak, died on the wrong side of the fence and remain heretics still. Bishop Oscar Romero, who died because of his stand in defence of the poor campesinos of El Salvador, stays out in the cold because he inevitably found himself on the same side as Marxist rebels and was tainted with their stigma whereas Carol Wojtyla, who openly challenged the Communists, will be beatified within a few years of his death.

So George Preca need not worry about his lowly status of poor people’s priest for the Company of Saints, as we have seen, is a heterogeneous lot. He has done even better than certain Popes like Boniface VIII, whom Dante sent head first into the sixth circle of Hell, or the original John XXIII, alias Baldassere Cossa, who was struck from the list of Popes due to his scandalous life and numerous crimes, better still than Catherine of Alexandria and George the dragon slayer who were expelled from the Company for insufficient material proof of their existence.

So well done George!!

Robert Paul Cachia