Who was the "Worst" Saint?

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Julia_Mae

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I was reading the Story of a Soul and I realized how incredibly far from being anything at all like Therese I am/was, even from earliest childhood. When I came into the Church, I picked Saint Francis because I read he had a pretty wild youth. But after I read a lot about him, no one really knows much. There was drinking and carousing, sort of generally spoken of, but his tradition holds he stopped short of sexual sins, himself.

So, who had the worst background, of the Saints, do you think?
 
Saint Augustine had a pretty crazy youth. Try reading confessions of st agustine. That might be what you are looking for.
 
Look up the book “Saints Behaving Badly” and you’ll find some great examples. Some that they list:

St. Dismas (The Thief on the Cross) - pretty self-explanatory
St. Fabiola - (a bigamist)
St. Olaf - (former Viking conqueror)
St. Moses the Ethiopian - (violent gang leader)
St. Alipius - (obsessed with blood sports in Roman times, friend of St. Augustine)
St. Mary of Egypt - (trolled streets looking for sexual conquests)
St. Thomas Beckett - (once denied his cloak to a beggar freezing to death)
St. Olga - (unleashed bloodbath on husband’s assassins)
St. Pelegia - (an actress of loose morals)
 
Saint Jerome had his cross to bear:

“Jerome was a strong, outspoken man. He had the virtues and the unpleasant fruits of being a fearless critic and all the usual moral problems of a man. He was, as someone has said, no admirer of moderation whether in virtue or against evil. He was swift to anger, but also swift to feel remorse, even more severe on his own shortcomings than on those of others. A pope is said to have remarked, on seeing a picture of Jerome striking his breast with a stone, “You do well to carry that stone, for without it the Church would never have canonized you” (Butler’s Lives of the Saints).”

From americancatholic.org/Features/Saints/Saint.aspx?id=1154
 
I chose St. Therse (little Flower) as my patron saint because of the story of her praying
for a condemned man who repented after she prayed for him. 👍
 
Try St Peregrine who stoned a priest (but not to death) before his conversion.
 
Barto Longo was a satanist.

I’m not saying I think this makes him the worst saint. I think there are many who think that God would forgive them or bless them because of things they have done in the past. St. Barto Longo may give hope to ex Satanists and others.
 
Wow! Thanks so much. I found Saints Behaving Badly on Amazon, BTW very reasonable. Sometimes I feel so far from the ones I admire, I wonder why I should even bother trying.

I thought of Saint Paul, of course, but he was whapped in the head by Jesus. And also, while he may have killed Christians, he thought he was doing the righteous thing. But there are those among us, or maybe just me, who know it’s the wrong thing and then did it anyway. I’m really interested in reading these other saints stories to understand their conversions.

If anybody thinks of anyone else I should delve into, please post, the more the better.
 
Julia_Mae said:
Wow! Thanks so much. I found Saints Behaving Badly on Amazon, BTW very reasonable. Sometimes I feel so far from the ones I admire, I wonder why I should even bother trying.

I thought of Saint Paul, of course, but he was whapped in the head by Jesus. And also, while he may have killed Christians, he thought he was doing the righteous thing. But there are those among us, or maybe just me, who know it’s the wrong thing and then did it anyway. I’m really interested in reading these other saints stories to understand their conversions.

If anybody thinks of anyone else I should delve into, please post, the more the better.
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I agree. St. Paul did not persecute Christians out of malice. He did it as a dutiful Jew implementing the Law of Moses. Christians back then were considered blasphemers for following Christ whom they also call a blasphemer. Leviticus 24:16 says anyone who blasphemes the Name of the Lord shall be put to death. So St. Paul wasn’t bad, he was being a good Jew. To the best of his knowledge at that time, the Christians were blasphemers.
 
It doesn’t matter if he thought he was doing the rigteous thing, bottom line is he killed people. And killed them simply for being Christian. He disobeyed the commandment of thou shall not kill, hardly being a good Jew.
 
No matter how “bad” any of the saints behaved before their conversion, the point is: a saint is not a special being, only a human being.

Even very holy people sin. True, their sins may seem nothing compared to ours, but only because of the “gift” of blindness that prevents us from realizing the profound horror of sin. The holier people become, the less they sin, yet the more they come to realize the horror of sin, inasmuch as even the tiniest imperfection is an offense to God Almighty and even the tiniest imperfection was reason for the immaculate Lamb to suffer terribly.

It is written that God is so ineffably great that nobody can see Him and live - we would literally die of awe. I consider that if we could see how much even the smallest sin offends God, we would literally die of sorrow. But that, of course, is only my thought.

I don’t think it’s very good to esteem a saint for how bad his past was. That would place on evil a worth that it lacks. I tell you that each of those saints had to undergo a most terrible and sorrowful purification because of their sins - though we know by the infallible declaration of Holy Church that a canonized saint is fully purified and at the presence of God in heaven.

The little flower was, of course, a very special soul, even as a Saint, considering that she is the Doctrix Amoris, that is, a Doctor of the Church (like St. Teresa of Avila or St. Thomas Aquinas) despite her death at a very young age. Her message, however, was one of great simplicity: in order to avoid offending God, we must become smaller and smaller. She is, in a way, a fulfillment of these words of Christ:
Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
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R_C said:
I don’t think it’s very good to esteem a saint for how bad his past was.
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I don’t think anyone is doing that. I’m not, that’s for sure.

However, when I read these stories of their lives, often they knew from very young ages that they wanted religious life, and they worked to keep themselves pure and practiced their religion … religiously! Others seem to have been essentially decent people who were led astray by something.

There are surely millions of saints with lives no one ever heard of, but all we can now are the ones we have heard of: victims and martyrs and Doctors and mystics. I’d like to read about people who seem more like me.
 
There’s no doubt that it would be Saint Paul – he persecuted the early Church and killed many Christians.

At the same time, he could also be the greatest – because he travelled far and wide in order to preach Christ whom he persecuted earlier.
 
Julia_Mae said:
I don’t think anyone is doing that. I’m not, that’s for sure.

However, when I read these stories of their lives, often they knew from very young ages that they wanted religious life, and they worked to keep themselves pure and practiced their religion … religiously! Others seem to have been essentially decent people who were led astray by something.

There are surely millions of saints with lives no one ever heard of, but all we can now are the ones we have heard of: victims and martyrs and Doctors and mystics. I’d like to read about people who seem more like me.
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Check out some of the saints canonized by JPII there are tons of people who lived ordinary lives in the modern world and did it with great sanctity. They have whole books on the saints canonized by JPII
 
october_baby said:
I chose St. Therse (little Flower) as my patron saint because of the story of her praying
for a condemned man who repented after she prayed for him. 👍
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Now if that man had become a Saint (did he?) THAT would be something!!
 
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