Does being more radical make you more holy?

[KingAlfred]

Seriously, it’s not a matter of being radical, but one involving the life-long study and faithful practice of discipleship.
The Disciple of Christ fights through all worldly ‘junk’ to live a holy life, to completely conquer himself therein, holding himself accountable to the highest standard of Christian obedience. Indeed, he is a warrrior, prosecuting an endless campaign, to defeat his lower self, while trying to realize, in the space and time of his own reality, the Kingdom of God on Earth. :knight1:

 

[Michael_Neal]

This is why I avoid reading about the saints. While I gain inspiration from the stories of people like Blessed Mother Theresa, Thomas Moore, and JPII, I can’t read stories that focus on self-punishment, extreme denial, and mortification. I understand that the lives of the saints must be taken in context, but I also believe that for many Catholics such stories can cause great anxiety. I have enough of that!

But this line from the quote SFD posted really speaks to that issue:
I am content to assume that the saints were unique in their calling from God and that some type of special grace was present that does not necessarily exist for everyone. Hence, the somewhat unpleasant and off-putting righteousness that can be displayed by some in their own personal quest for sainthood.

I figured God called saints. I never thought we could tell God we should be or could be saints.

Actually we are all called to be saints, but all saints are not alike. We don’t have to try to be exactly like St. Francis and deny ourselves every possible thing on earth to become saints. I see saints like that as Super Saints. Most of us probably can not even approach their level of holiness, trying to do that will likely lead to failure and depression.

There are also a lot of saints (recognized and unrecognized) who lived somewhat ordinary lives, they demonstrated some sort of heroic virtue in their life.

I am nowhere near being even an ordinary saint but to say that I could never be a saint is way too pessimistic and it would ensure that I would not be successful.

Everyone who makes it to heaven is a saint, and if we are not we won’t make it.

 

[Nans]

No, that kind of thing isn’t holy. Your job was to help people find God. Saying things like that drives people away from God, and that was on your conscience. I’m glad you found another path!

When I read that part of the OP’s post I was going to comment on it saying that someone did that to me just yesterday and I almost said to myself “Forget it. I am very happy at my protestant church, what am I even looking around for”

So yeah, it definitely can have that effect!

 

[SFD]

This is why I avoid reading about the saints.

This is unfortunate, as the lives of the Saints should be edifying to you.

I can’t read stories that focus on self-punishment, extreme denial, and mortification. I understand that the lives of the saints must be taken in context, but I also believe that for many Catholics such stories can cause great anxiety. I have enough of that!

Not all of the Saints lived such a life…but there is much to be learned from those who did. I suspect your modern tendencies cause you to be repulsed by intense suffering.

But this line from the quote SFD posted really speaks to that issue:

For one pious man who makes piety attractive, there are nine who make it repulsive.

But these nine are not saints…that is Fr. Faber’s point!

I am content to assume that the saints were unique in their calling from God and that some type of special grace was present that does not necessarily exist for everyone. **Hence, the somewhat unpleasant and off-putting righteousness that can be displayed by some in their own personal quest for sainthood.

I figured God called saints. I never thought we could tell God we should be or could be saints**.

We should all be Saints…as a matter of fact Our Lord tells us this very thing…be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. The way of perfection is for all. It is a commandment…not a suggestion. He call all to be Saints.

SFD

 

[SFD]

Actually we are all called to be saints, but all saints are not alike. We don’t have to try to be exactly like St. Francis and deny ourselves every possible thing on earth to become saints. I see saints like that as Super Saints. Most of us probably can not even approach their level of holiness, trying to do that will likely lead to failure and depression.

There are also a lot of saints (recognized and unrecognized) who lived somewhat ordinary lives, they demonstrated some sort of heroic virtue in their life.

We are first called to perfection IN OUR STATE OF LIFE. Our duties of state come first and it is through these duties that we attain perfection.Take up your cross and follow Me.

From the Preface of THE STORY OF A SOUL (L’HISTOIRE D’UNE AME): THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ST. THERESE OF LISIEUX:

…It is the old story of simplicity in God’s service, of the perfect accomplishment of small recurring duties, of trustful confidence in Him who made and has redeemed and sanctified us. Humility, self-effacement, obedience, hiddenness, unfaltering charity, with all the self-control and constant effort that they imply, are written on every page of the history of this little Saint. And, as we turn its pages, the lesson is borne in upon our souls that there is no surer nor safer way of pleasing Our Father Who is in Heaven than by remaining ever as little children in His sight. Doubtless for many of her clients whose hearts are kindled as they read this book, Soeur Therese will obtain, as she has done so often in the past, wonderful gifts for health of soul and body.

But may she win for all of us without exception a deep and fruitful conviction of the unchanging truth, that unless we become as little children in the doing of our Heavenly Father’s Will, we cannot enter into our Eternal Home.

FRANCIS CARDINAL BOURNE, Archbishop of Westminster.

Feast of the Presentation of Our Blessed Lady, 1912.

“the perfect accomplishment of small recurring duties” hardly sounds radical!

SFD

 

[blessedtoo]

This is unfortunate, as the lives of the Saints should be edifying to you.

Some of them are, some are not, as I mentioned before.

Not all of the Saints lived such a life…but there is much to be learned from those who did. I suspect your modern tendencies cause you to be repulsed by intense suffering.

Wow! You don’t even know me yet you make such an assumption? I don’t have “modern tendencies” and, as an aside, I have suffered with a chronic, painful and debilitating physical condition for over 30 years. I am neither repulsed nor titillated by suffering. It is what it is. If you have it, bear it. If you don’t, count your blessings.

But these nine are not saints…that is Fr. Faber’s point!

I understood his point perfectly.

We should all be Saints…as a matter of fact Our Lord tells us this very thing…be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. The way of perfection is for all. It is a commandment…not a suggestion. He call all to be Saints.

Which commandment is that?

I don’t want to argue with you about who is or isn’t called to sainthood. I will just reiterate my original point. I believe God calls people to sainthood and imparts to SOME the graces necessary to achieve it. But personally, I have not been inclined nor given the grace to live on nothing but the Eucharist for 20 years. I have not felt compelled nor have I been given the grace or the calling to lash myself in commemoration of Our Lord’s scourging. I haven’t been called to a vocation either but I can certainly relate much more to Mother Theresa and JPII and those are the folks whose saintliness inspires me.

 

[SFD]

blessedtoo:

Wow! You don’t even know me yet you make such an assumption? I don’t have “modern tendencies” and, as an aside, I have suffered with a chronic, painful and debilitating physical condition for over 30 years. I am neither repulsed nor titillated by suffering. It is what it is. If you have it, bear it. If you don’t, count your blessings

I don’t need to know you. We all have modern tendencies…myself included. We live today and are influenced by the times in which we live…I don’t think one can argue against that.

Which commandment is that?

Christ gave us the commandment…go look it up…it’s Matthew (v. 48).

I don’t want to argue with you about who is or isn’t called to sainthood.

We are all called to perfection. You are confusing a canonised saint with any saint. All saints are not canonised by the Church.

I will just reiterate my original point. I believe God calls people to sainthood and imparts to SOME the graces necessary to achieve it. But personally, I have not been inclined nor given the grace to live on nothing but the Eucharist for 20 years. I have not felt compelled nor have I been given the grace or the calling to lash myself in commemoration of Our Lord’s scourging. I haven’t been called to a vocation either

Marriage is a vocation. Do you think all vocations are religious?

Just because one saint lived a certain life does not mean you need to desire that particular life. One need not live the same life to be edified by that saint’s life.
The Catechism Explained:

The Church commemorates one or more of the saints on each day of the ecclesiastical year, in order to incite us to their imitation.

…]

Almost every saint excelled in the practice of one particular virtue. The actions of each were suited to and in conformity with the circumstances and environment they were placed, e.g., their calling, their means, their bodily strength and natural temperment. Everyone ought choose for his model a saint whose position and calling were similar to his own.

We ought avoid impuning those saints whose circumstances were different then ours…that much should be obvious.

but I can certainly relate much more to Mother Theresa and JPII and those are the folks whose saintliness inspires me.

This was my point about our modern sensibilities…more humanistic individuals are attractive to us. Those who despised worldy things (including all creatures) are not attractive to us. The perfection of the Christian consists in charity towards God and his neighbor, and in detachment of the heart from things of this world.

SFD

 

[Auntie_M]

Sainthood is NOT reached by mutulizing yourself. If you need to “hurt” yourself because you feel not worthy, then that is your problem. That is NOT how Jesus’ taught us forgiveness. He knows our sins before we ever ask, AND He still loves us. The Bible says our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, If we believe that…WHY would anybody WANT to hurt it.

One can be “saintly” towards another with charity, love, understanding. Some of the same people who you help in this life just might call you a saint in the next.

Pray and ask God to show you a saint, today, in this modern world, one that you can pattern your life like.

Depriving yourself of life’s necessities is NOT showing the love of our God to anyone. Who would want to love a god that makes you hurt yourself.

We are taught in the Bible…GOD IS L O V E

Love is NOT destroying yourself for Christ…

(and, today, that is really called “mental illness”)

 

[SFD]

Sainthood is NOT reached by mutulizing yourself. If you need to “hurt” yourself because you feel not worthy, then that is your problem. That is NOT how Jesus’ taught us forgiveness. He knows our sins before we ever ask, AND He still loves us. The Bible says our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, If we believe that…WHY would anybody WANT to hurt it.

One can be “saintly” towards another with charity, love, understanding. Some of the same people who you help in this life just might call you a saint in the next.

Pray and ask God to show you a saint, today, in this modern world, one that you can pattern your life like.

Depriving yourself of life’s necessities is NOT showing the love of our God to anyone. Who would want to love a god that makes you hurt yourself.

We are taught in the Bible…GOD IS L O V E

Love is NOT destroying yourself for Christ…

(and, today, that is really called “mental illness”)

Does anyone want to defend what she just said?

Here’s a good example of the poor catechisis so many of you speak of. And on top of it all Auntie M tell us that some of the Saints of old had a “mental illness”.

SFD

 

[Henri_Searcher]

Cari amici! Let us not be too hasty looking for quick fix answers to deep paradoxes that require the discernment of the Holy Spirit: the divine person who moves “interior intimo meo” and discerns all things and moves all things where He Wills and not on to the stingy levels of our own rational/emotional/cultural prejudices and creatural limitations.
Lets go the source and try to discern in sincere and transparently honest prayer what the Spirit is moving us to do in cooperation for the love.
I have known people who used disciplines and fasting and other rigours on a daily basis and read avidly from the lives of the saints. And what? Can I know say “pah all that was just hypocrisy! DIY Jansenism!”
Indeed I cannot say this. For there were holy and good and sincere people amongst there numbers who burned with a contagious love of God.
However I have also known groups of people who used these ascetic techniques considerably less. They were young seminarians and priests and laity who lived intensively but took seriously the need for tangible and genuine fraternity amongst themselves and with the wider community they were called to serve. (This is impossible I feel if the asceticism becomes an end in itself and military obedience replaces deep and genuine fraternal and paternal partnership and cohesion.) My latter friends would play football with the local police, other seminaries, local teams and the Bishop was even the referee. However these lads were not all matchstick men! Some of the priests had a good stout belly indeed! Were they then relaxed liberals, wayward worldlies…reserves instead of Airborne specials??? Indeed no. They were on for the long haul, commited and they were men of big hearts, real not mechanic, they helped us laity to love God and to love each other with more realism and enthusiasm.
The Church is a Mystery-because it is the body of Christ. If Christ in his incarnation is an unfathomable paradox in his divinity and PERFECT humanity how much more the Church is a paradox being wed to the divine and as the zone of divine encounter in a humanity that history has shown to be FAR FROM PERFECT.
The Spirit dwells in this Body and we need to fully dwell in this Mystery, dwell, live and contemplate rather than rationally disect too much. The Divine Paradoxes in Christianity do not admit of easy tabloid style solutions. Every attempt to give quick fix solutions has led to errors equivalent to the heresies that they were intended to solve.
As H. de Lubac states in “Catholicism” : to be Catholic is not to be anti-protestant, anti-modern, anti-muslim,jew or anti-anything per-se. It is to be UNIVERSAL: arms and minds wide open, embracing the good we find wherever we find it and trying to bring it into its fullness in the full UNION that is the UNIVERSAL Church. "Rites or morality, authority or liberty, faith or works, nature or grace, prayer or sacrifice, Bible or Pope, Christ Saviour or Christ the Judge, Sacramentalism or spirituality, mysticism or prophetism…Catholicism does not accept these partitions. "
I started this thread a little annoyed with certain movements in the Church: that maybe live in the reality of these too precise polemics and who want to be fanatically convinced of their side of every argument. However I too shudder away from condemming all that is not for me just now, all that does not bring me into a more loving relationship with our Heavenly Father. There is so much richness, at times good things seem paradoxical, contradicting each other, and yet…we are in the midst of Mystery and must walk it humbly, sincerely, trustingly.Awaiting the Spirit to clarify a path for each of us, where there is room, and there is so much room within the Church!
Ciao 4 now, carissimi!

 

[Auntie_M]

I knew I’d get backlash on that one…

The Fathers of the Church or the original saints never “whipped/tortured” themselves. They suffered alright, but not by their own hands. There was enough persecution in the early days of the church, they didn’t need to add anymore.

Jesus taught us “Love thy neighbor as thyself”.

IF you love your neighbor as yourself and you go around beating up yourself, What would you do to your neighbor?

If anyone feels differently, please let me know where you live, I really don’t want to be your neighbor.

I love me because Jesus loves me and that, my friend, is being Christlike.

 

[WH1988]

I knew I’d get backlash on that one…

The Fathers of the Church or the original saints never “whipped/tortured” themselves. They suffered alright, but not by their own hands. There was enough persecution in the early days of the church, they didn’t need to add anymore.

Jesus taught us “Love thy neighbor as thyself”.

IF you love your neighbor as yourself and you go around beating up yourself, What would you do to your neighbor?

If anyone feels differently, please let me know where you live, I really don’t want to be your neighbor.

I love me because Jesus loves me and that, my friend, is being Christlike.

Mortification is and always was encouraged by the church. It’s not optional, even if you don’t call it mortification. You cannot be a good Christian if you don’t voluntarely give up something, or make a sacrifice, and offer it to God. Of course, the most important is always charity, but mortification really helps you doing God’s will and paying attention to the other’s needs - mortification is dying to the ‘world’ in order to serve God and the souls. It can be of tremendous importance to fight frequent sin, like chastity problems.

 

[blessedtoo]

Mortification is and always was encouraged by the church. It’s not optional, even if you don’t call it mortification. You cannot be a good Christian if you don’t voluntarely give up something, or make a sacrifice, and offer it to God. Of course, the most important is always charity, but mortification really helps you doing God’s will and paying attention to the other’s needs - mortification is dying to the ‘world’ in order to serve God and the souls. It can be of tremendous importance to fight frequent sin, like chastity problems.

First, I think it’s dangerous to make statements like “you cannot be a good Christian if…”. While your point about sacrifice is valid, you place a judgment on others whom you don’t know when you preface it with such a declaration.

I think there is a big difference between abstaining from meat on Friday’s and abstaining from all food and drink for years to live on only the Eucharist. If we can’t admit that such a saint has been given special graces to accomplish such a sacrifice, then I challenge you to try it yourself.

I think Auntie M is likely referring to extreme mortification, as was I.

 

[WH1988]

First, I think it’s dangerous to make statements like “you cannot be a good Christian if…”. While your point about sacrifice is valid, you place a judgment on others whom you don’t know when you preface it with such a declaration.

It’s only dangerous when I use such a preface to say some dubious thing. What I said isn’t and can’t be controversial. What I said was: You cannot be a good Christian if you don’t voluntarely give up something, or make a sacrifice, and offer it to God.

I think there is a big difference between abstaining from meat on Friday’s and abstaining from all food and drink for years to live on only the Eucharist.

Agreed. That’s why we should always search for small mortifications, and obbey to the Spiritual Director about larger ones.

 

[Michael_Neal]

would you whip yourself if that was the last resort and only thing that would work to stop you from a particular sin?

 

[WH1988]

would you whip yourself if that was the last resort and only thing that would work to stop you from a particular sin?

God willingly, I’d prefer to die than to fall in mortal sin. Everything is better than betraying God in such a measure.

I wish I could put this beautiful thoughts in practice more often, though.

 

[Michael_Neal]

So that settles the issue on saints and self whipping, anything is better than committing a mortal sin is the answer that we are expected to embrace. And for some saints even venial sin was a justification for such things.

Not that I actually put to this to practice, but maybe I should.

 

[SFD]

I knew I’d get backlash on that one…

Because its wrong.

The Fathers of the Church or the original saints never “whipped/tortured” themselves. They suffered alright, but not by their own hands. There was enough persecution in the early days of the church, they didn’t need to add anymore.

Jesus taught us “Love thy neighbor as thyself”.

IF you love your neighbor as yourself and you go around beating up yourself, What would you do to your neighbor?

If anyone feels differently, please let me know where you live, I really don’t want to be your neighbor.

I love me because Jesus loves me and that, my friend, is being Christlike.

Here, AuntieM, now that you’ve given us YOUR gospel, read this one:

Douay-Rheims Bible, St. Paul, 1st Corinthians 9:27

21 To them that are under the law, as if I were under the law, (whereas myself was not under the law,) that I might gain them that were under the law. To them that were without the law, as if I were without the law, (whereas I was not without the law of God, but was in the law of Christ,) that I might gain them that were without the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, that I might gain the weak. I became all things to all men, that I might save all. 23 And I do all things for the gospel’s sake: that I may be made partaker thereof. 24 Know you not that they that run in the race, all run indeed, but one receiveth the prize? So run that you may obtain. 25 And every one that striveth for the mastery, refraineth himself from all things: and they indeed that they may receive a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible one.

26 I therefore so run, not as at an uncertainty: I so fight, not as one beating the air: 27 But I chastise my body, and bring it into subjection: lest perhaps, when I have preached to others, I myself should become a castaway.

27** “I chastise”… Here St. Paul shows the necessity of self-denial and mortification, to subdue the flesh**, and its inordinate desires.

SFD

 

[blessedtoo]

would you whip yourself if that was the last resort and only thing that would work to stop you from a particular sin?

Why on earth would that be a “last resort”? What does that even mean?

If I were prone to a particular sin, I would PRAY ceaselessly for God to grant me the grace to overcome. In all the years that I have confessed to priests about specific sins with which I have struggled, I have NEVER heard the suggestion that “whipping myself”, or anything even remotely similar, would be efficacious or advisable.

Thanks, but I will follow the advice of my priests.

 

[Michael_Neal]

If it worked while praying ceaselessly did not I don’t see why it would not be advisable.