Scripting the Saints: Reflections by Four Distinguished Authors

Four reflective essays are shared by Lawrence S. Cunningham, Robert Ellsberg, Wendy M. Wright, and James Martin, S.J. These essays were originally presented at a special invited panel at the meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America in San Jose, California on June 10, 2011.

Lawrence S. Cunningham

One of my main scholarly concerns in over three decades of academic life has been the place of the saints in the Catholic theological tradition. I came to this interest almost by accident. Assigned to teach a course on religion and literature early in my career I designed a semester of study under the rubric "Belief and Unbelief in Modern Fiction." One day in class, as we were discussing Albert Camus's novel The Plague, a student noted that one of the characters said to the main protagonist, Doctor Rieux, that he wanted to be a saint. Rieux asked how that could be since the person was not a believer. He responded that the main problem of the time was how to become a saint when one did not believe in God. A similar issue had been raised by the hero of Ignazio Silone's novel Bread and Wine. What did a saint look like in an unbelieving world? The student then asked me: "Well, what is a saint?" It was that question, posed by a non-Catholic student, which led me to think about the issue of how one defined a saint and what such sanctity had to do with the Christian life.

It is not easy to give an easy answer to such a question. The church has honored a bewildering variety of persons as saints. Nor was there a formal canonization process until the Middle Ages. Of those people honored as saints, some we know nothing about in any reliable fashion (Saint Christopher); others did not seem to be very pleasant people (e.g. Saint Jerome); still others were invoked for "favors" like Saint Jude or Saint Anthony, while others are held up as models of a certain kind of spirituality like Saint Francis. To complicate matters, lots of people are considered saints who have never been canonized like a pious deceased grandparent whom one admires. In the language of the bible the term "saint" or "holy one" was a term used, for example by Saint Paul, to describe the body of believers in general.

These issues led me eventually to write a book called The Meaning of Saints (1981) which, while by no means a perfect work, did orient me to probe more deeply into the question of saints but from more a theological angle than a sociological or historical one. Inspired by investigation into the meaning of the saintly life by such theologians as the late Hans Urs Von Balthasar it struck me that one could think about saints as exegetes of the Word of God not on paper but by the way they performed the scriptures. Furthermore, one can pursue reflections on the saints from an eschatological point of view: how do the members of the church "above" relate to the church "below"? Asking questions like that, of course, sheds some light on how we understand the church as communion and, in the process, thickens our creedal affirmation that we "believe in the communion of saints."

My own work has centered mainly on the saint as "model." Thus, I have paid insufficient attention to other aspects of the saintly life: the intercessory role of the saints; the theology behind the veneration of relics; the place of pilgrimage in the spiritual life of Christians; the slow erosion of the sanctoral calendar in the awareness of contemporary Christians. Those are all interests of mine but I have not thought about them sufficiently to add anything to the discussion. The saint as a model or paradigm is subject enough, however, because it ramifies out in such various directions. The saint as model, for example, helps us understand the development of what has...