Article: The love of the saints

FATHER GEORGE W. RUTLER

No generation has had more saints to intercede for them than ours has.

Last week, Pope Benedict XVI raised three new ones to the altars. Saint Guido Maria Conforti, bishop of Ravenna and Parma, though plagued by ill health, founded the Xaverian Missionaries for the conversion of non-Christians; he died in 1931. Saint Luigi Guanella, who died in 1915, founded three religious orders specially devoted to the care of the sick and dying. Saint Bonifacia Rodríguez Castro, who entered heaven in 1905, founded an order whose special dedication is to women who are poor or unemployed.

The good works these saints did were outward manifestations of the two commandments which our Lord declared to be the bedrock of all moral laws: love of God and love of one another (cf. Matthew 22:34-40).

Jesus cited those two commandments, from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, in response to the Pharisees who were testing Him. He had already confounded the Sadducees, who had tried to trick Him with cynical questionings. Sadducees and Pharisees live in every generation. The Sadducees were materialistic skeptics who did not believe in what they could not immediately comprehend, such as eternal life, rather like the Modernists of recent times. The Pharisees accepted supernatural mysteries such as angels and the resurrection of the dead, but were arrogant about their faith, quite like anyone smugly pious enough to pose as more Catholic than the Pope.

Jesus disturbed both parties by digging into the bedrock of holiness that is the love of God made tangible in the way we behave with our fellow humans. The superficial contradiction of that is solipsism, or self absorption, neglecting God and neighbor. In the Greek myth, Narcissus was so in love with his own reflection that he rejected the voice of the woodland nymph Echo, who loved him. Saints do not live in isolation, and so the voice of God does not bounce off them.

In September, Pope Benedict told the German federal parliament that society is in danger of taking on a "bunker" mentality, isolated in a windowless world, whose light and atmosphere are artificial. Such is the fate of the solipsist. Last week was the feast of Saint John of Capistrano, who was anything but a solipsist. He used his brains and energy to relieve the siege of Belgrade in 1456 and helped to save our civilization. His love of God was not an abstraction. At the time of the battle, Pope Callixtus III ordered that church bells be rung at noon, and noonday bells have rung ever since. On All Saints' Day, the bells recall the divine love that Christ brought to earth and made tangible: "What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon and touched with our hands…" (1 John 1:1).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Father George William Rutler. "The love of the saints." From the Pastor (October 30, 2011).

Reprinted with permission of Father George W. Rutler.

THE AUTHOR

Father Rutler received priestly ordination in 1981. Born in 1945 and reared in the Episcopal tradition, Father Rutler was an Episcopal priest for nine years. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1979 and was sent to the North American College in Rome for seminary studies. Father Rutler graduated from Dartmouth, where he was a Rufus Choate Scholar, and took advanced degrees at the Johns Hopkins University and the General Theological Seminary. He holds several degrees from the Gregorian and Angelicum Universities in Rome, including the Pontifical Doctorate in Sacred Theology, and studied at the Institut Catholique in Paris. In England, in 1988, the University of Oxford awarded him the degree Master of Studies. From 1987 to 1989 he was regular preacher to the students, faculty, and townspeople of Oxford. Cardinal Egan appointed him Pastor of theChurch of Our Saviour, effective September 17, 2001.

Since 1988 his weekly television program has been broadcast worldwide on EWTN. Father Rutler has published 17 books, including: Cloud of Witnesses - Dead People I Knew When They Were Alive, Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections, A Crisis of Saints: Essays on People and Principles, Brightest and Best, Saint John Vianney: The Cure D'Ars Today, Crisis in Culture, and Adam Danced: The Cross and the Seven Deadly Sins.

Copyright © 2011 Father George W. Rutler