I suppose the writings about some saints depends on who is doing the writing. In order to achieve sanctity they all had to go through many struggles.Good perspective, thank you, I enjoyed it.
One of the reasons I enjoy the more modern saints is that their biographies tend to be a little more realistic and you can more easily see that they did have faults and setbacks, as opposed to many of the very flowery depictions of saints from the last century and preceding that. This is not true of all the “old time” saints; St. Augustine for example had quite a notorious life by all accounts, and St. Teresa of Avila always seemed refreshingly down to earth for her era, but for many others you do not get any sense of them as struggling human people.
I find that a lot of good, sincere, and otherwise orthodox Catholics are (there is no other way to put it) too obsessed with how things “should” be rather than how they are. (I use quotes and the word “otherwise” because “good things and evil… are from God” and therefore are exactly as they should be.) Granted, it is useful to know what we can no longer assume is safe (like television and “Catholic” schools, for example). However, what I often see is a fixation on “the good old days” when the culture affirmed Catholicism, in morals if not in doctrine. Even assuming that this is true, there is nothing we can do about it. True, natural selection will probably favor devout Catholics, as few others have large families, but that’s in the long run, and in the long run, we will all be in Heaven, Purgatory, or Hell.We will not be able to single handedly bring about a new golden age, but to labor and suffer in the midst of a lesser one.