Editorial

We are called to be saints, witnessing in love to Christ in our daily lives

It is cited in Scripture, and we’ve heard it from popes past and present: we are called to be saints. Regardless of age, race or ethnicity, every baptized person is called to be a saint.

In Indiana, we are blessed by the life of St. Theodora Guérin, the foundress of the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods near Terre Haute, who was a model of evangelization, built Catholic schools and helped form a faith community on the Indiana frontier.

She was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 and is co-patron of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis with

St. Francis Xavier, a 16th-century Jesuit missionary priest who served in India, Malaysia and Japan. The cathedral of the original Diocese of Vincennes (which later became the Archdiocese of Indianapolis) is named for him. Many believe St. Francis Xavier was named the first patron of the archdiocese as a result of the French settlers who first came to the Vincennes area and the Jesuit missionaries who served them.

While both saints lived centuries ago, others on the road to sainthood have more recent histories.

Pope Francis last week declared two women as venerable: Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange, founder of the first Catholic order of African American nuns, and Carmelite Sister Lúcia dos Santos, who, with two cousins, reported seeing Mary when she was a child in Fátima, Portugal. The pope signed the decrees recognizing their heroic virtues on June 22.

A miracle attributed to their intercession is still ordinarily necessary before they can be declared “blessed.” Another miracle would be needed for canonization, when a person is declared a saint.

Born in Cuba to Haitian parents, Mother Lange came to the United States around 1813, settling near Baltimore, and saw how the children of other immigrants needed education.

“She was determined to respond to that need in spite of being a Black woman in a slave state long before the Emancipation Proclamation,” says the official website of her sainthood cause. “She used her own money and home to educate children of color,” establishing the first Catholic school for children of color in the United States.

With the encouragement and support of a priest and Archbishop James Whitfield of Baltimore, she and three other women made promises of poverty, chastity and obedience in 1829, founding the Oblate Sisters of Providence, an order that continues today. Mother Lange died in 1882.

Sister Lúcia died in 2005 at the age of 97. Pope Francis canonized her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, in 2017. She was 10 years old when she and her cousins first saw the Blessed Mother at Fatima on May 13, 1917.

Her sainthood cause examined her entire life and the volumes of correspondence she wrote as a cloistered nun.

Much of her writing involved her attempts to clarify what became known as the secrets of Fatima as relayed to the three children by the Blessed Mother. In the 1930s, Sister Lúcia shared the first two parts. They included a vision of hell shown to the children, along with prophecies concerning the outbreak of World War II, the rise of communism and the ultimate triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, especially in Russia if the country was consecrated to her Immaculate Heart.

Sister Lúcia wrote down the third part of the message, sealed it in an envelope and gave it to her bishop. The message was sent to the Vatican in 1957, where successive popes read it, but did not reveal its contents.

St. John Paul II ordered the so-called “third secret” of Fatima to be published in 2000; he believed the secret, actually a vision, referred to the 20th-century persecution of the Church under Nazism and communism and spoke of the 1981 attempt to assassinate him. The pope was shot on May 13, 1981, the anniversary of the first of the Fatima apparitions, but survived, he believed, through the intercession of our Blessed Mother.

Saints have much in common: their lives always pointed to Christ, and they showed others the way to Christ. They are agents of Christ’s light and love. They are instruments in building his kingdom on Earth.

Pope Francis reminded us at an audience at the Vatican in 2014: “It is by living with love and offering Christian witness in our daily tasks that we are called to become saints. … Always and everywhere you can become a saint, that is, by being receptive to the grace that is working in us and leads us to holiness.”

—Mike Krokos