“I would like to know the defects of the saints and what they did to correct these defects.” (Saint Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes).
A Saint is a soul who goes straight to Heaven after they die. And the Saints include the souls canonised by the Catholic Church. These souls are the souls whose lives and deaths the Church examines carefully to make sure that there is some proof or evidence that the soul is in fact in Heaven. And one of the things that are considered is the performance of several miracles through the intercession of the Saint after their death. And these miracles are examined and studied and considered by various experts and doctors to confirm that they are in fact miracles where there was not possible explanation of a solution except for the intercession of the Saint to God Himself and the ultimate intervention of God. And to get to this stage can take a matter of years for son Saints and a matter of decades or even centuries for others.
Consider the case of Saint Joan d’Arc. Saint Joan d’Arc received visions of Christ asking her to raise an army to save the French from the English invasion in the fifteenth century. In 1431, when she was only nineteen years old, Saint Joan was burned at the stake as a heretic after a corrupt Church found her guilty of heresy. Later the trial was nullified by the Church and half a millennium later – which is five hundred years later – in 1920 Joan d’Arc was declared a saint by Pope Benedict XV.
So, these things take time. But there are other saints as well... And the acknowledgement of their sanctification can take even longer…
These are the saints who are not canonised by the Catholic Church. Instead, these souls are the souls who still go straight to Heaven when they die, but they are not publicly acknowledged by the Catholic Church. In fact these souls may never be publicly acknowledged by the Catholic Church. Perhaps until we reach Heaven ourselves, we shall not understand who is in Heaven and who is not.
These souls are the children who die after Baptism, in innocence and without having committed sin. They are the quiet souls who nobody acknowledges or understands. They are the souls of people who lived good lives well and suffered and sacrificed quietly. And I have been thinking about those souls as well today because these souls are the souls of the Saints…
Saint Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes said, “I would like to know the defects of the saints and what they did to correct these defects. That would help me much more than hearing about their miracles and ecstasies.”
And I have been thinking about that today. You see it seems to me that my life should be lived in the service of God and in the effort for sanctification. And it does not matter whether I am publicly acknowledged as a Saint or merely a saint through my quiet interactions with God that only He sees, it only matters that I am pleasing to my Beloved.
And I have been thinking about that as I think about my defects. For it seems I have much upon which to reflect if I wish to see my God in Heaven one day.
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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