How Saints Die is edifying and challenging Lenten reading

I know you are looking for good Lenten reading. I’ve got a great recommendation. How Saints Die: 100 Stories of Hope by Fr. Antonio Maria Sicari (Ignatius, 2021).

Okay, I had the same reaction you just had. “I don’t want to read about a hundred different ways to die. In fact, I don’t want to read about dying at all.”

But it’s the wrong reaction, and I will help you get past it.

First of all, each of the stories are short. Very short. Most of them less than 2 pages. You can get through 2 ½ a day in 40 days. Lent. Done.

Secondly, they are unusually edifying, offering in some cases a different angle on saints you already know, or think you know, and, even better, adding dozens of saints you’ve never heard of. I know it’s strange to be introduced to someone on their deathbed, but it certainly makes you think, if not pray – things you should especially be doing during Lent.

Fr. Sicari is a Carmelite from Italy, and not surprisingly, a lot of the stories in the book are about the deaths of Carmelite saints and Italian saints or both.

I had never heard of St. Maria Bertilla Boscardin, but she is from my wife’s hometown of Treviso, Italy. My wife had never heard of her either.

St. Maria Bertilla was brought up in poverty and humiliation, but she was allowed to enter the consecrated life when she was only 15 because of the pureness of her desire to serve God. She was sent to a hospital to work in the kitchen, but after a year took over as the head of the ward for contagious children because no one else wanted the job. She never got an education, she went from being an obscure and neglected lowly servant to such a visible model of charity and holiness that people practically fought to be near her. She died in 1922 at the age of 34.

The attending physician at her deathbed was a freethinker and a freemason, but his life changed as a result of watching St. Maria Bertilla die. A doctor who had seen many deaths, he’d never seen anything like this. “Plain joy” in spite of an extremely painful illness, “the state in which a patient ordinarily grabs on to the doctor and pleads ‘save me’…” Instead she said “Be happy, Sisters, I am going to my God.”

The doctor observed how Maria seemed to be both present with those around her, comforting them, while she was already a spirit beyond, “much more evident and dominant,” already enjoying the happiness of eternal life.”

As a result, he became a Catholic.

It would be a good exercise to make a list of “attending physicians” who become Catholic as a result of witnessing firsthand the sufferings of the saints. The list should include “attending nurses.”

Or maybe that should be a separate list. Because the attending nurse at the death of Blessed Titus Brandsma did not merely witness his death, she was the one who killed him, injecting him with poison at the behest of the Nazis who had tortured him and experimented on him. Fr. Brandsma was a Dutch Carmelite who was a professor of philosophy and rector at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. He published a pamphlet objecting to the Nazi treatment of the Jews, and warned his students about the “menacing tendencies” of the National Socialists. for which he was arrested and deported to Dachau.

After his horrible ill-treatment, when he was brought into the infirmary, he was already on the “list of the dead,” but he looked kindly and forgivingly on the nurse. He took her hand and said, “You poor, poor girl, I’ll pray for you.” He gave her some rosary beads which he had fashioned himself out of wire and wood, and she snapped at him that they would do her no good because she didn’t know how to pray the rosary. Fr. Titus responded, “Just say ‘Pray for us sinners.’”

He said of his torturers, “They, too, are children of the good God, and perhaps there is till something left in them.”

Even though this was not the first time she had done it, the nurse was sickened by her act. She never forgot it. She never forgot Fr. Titus. “He had compassion for me.” As the author says, the Blessed Titus “was able to bring to life the one who had just given him death.”

Saint Camillus de Lellis was another Italian, who founded the Order of the Clerks Regular, Ministers of the Infirm, and ran hospitals in Naples, Milan, Genoa, Palermo, Bologna, and Mantua. After spending his life serving the sick and dying, in 1614 he took a room of his own in Rome’s Hospital of the Holy Spirit, there to die. At the very moment the anointing priest pronounced the words “May Christ show His meek and merry face,” St. Camillus left this world with a smile. No doubt he was looking into the merry face of Christ, but he also may have been thinking about his Last Will and Testament. Penniless and without any possessions, he willed his body to the earth, his sins to the devil, all vanities to the world, his friends for the company of the saints, his relatives for the sweetness of the angels, all worldly curiosities for the true vision of the face of God, his soul to Jesus and his will to Mary, Mother of God, so that his will would be the same as hers.

Of course, you’re wondering about the death of the saint who is not in this book because he is not yet officially a saint. G.K. Chesterton died a holy death in 1936. Just before he died, going in and out of consciousness, he said marvelously, “The issue is clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.”

How Saints Die: 100 Stories of Hope
By Fr. Antonio Maria Sicari, O.C.D.
Ignatius Press, 2021
Paperback, 234 pages