Every saint was a sinner and every sinner should be a saint

Our Lenten journey through the saints in the Confiteor ends this week. After asking the intercession of Our Lady, St. Michael, St. John the Baptist, and Ss. Peter and Paul, the old Confiteor offers more: “and all the saints.”

We do well to remember that every saint was a sinner and every sinner can be a saint. Not only can he be, but he should be, because otherwise his life is a failure. A saint is simply someone who has attained heaven. If you don’t, nothing else profited you anything (cf Mk 8:36).

Considering the truth that every saint became a saint even though he was a sinner ought to make us think in a new way about “all saints,” the communion of saints. It’s not (just) a “winner’s circle” or feast for those who “made it.” It’s an opportunity for us to consider that they were just like us, with many of the same problems and sins, but also many of the same spiritual opportunities.

They succeeded. Why can’t you and I do the same?

The catalog of canonized saints provides varied examples of holiness; let’s conclude this series by looking at some of them.

There’s St. Matthew, a tax collector. Now, nobody loves a tax collector, but Catholics working for the IRS should not think themselves accursed (even though it is tax season). Tax collectors in Jesus’ day were considered sinners because of how the system worked. A tax collector often competed for a particular district, which, if acquired, was accompanied by a certain revenue quota. His job was to deliver that sum. He made sure he did so as not to incur personal liability.

But there was nothing in the rules that forbade including his income and expenses in the taxes. And a lot depended on the lifestyle to which your neighborhood tax collector had become accustomed. In other words, it was a system open to corruption, abuse, and, yes, thievery. But it was a great living. So, it says a lot when, in response to Jesus’s call to follow Him, that’s exactly just what Matthew got up and did (Mt 9:9).

Lesson: “If today you hear His voice, harden not your heart” (Ps 95:7-8; Heb 3:15).

There’s St. Augustine. His mother, St. Monica, spent much of her life praying for his conversion, but Augustine was enough of an intellectual to have excuses at the ready for delaying it. I once heard a priest who summed up Augustine’s prayer as “Lord, convert me! Do it tomorrow!” Augustine dabbled in many intellectual fads and trends before turning to Christ. But when he turned, there was no turning back, and the man who lived his life in concubinage and with an illegitimate child eventually became the Western Church’s most important theological mind for the next 800 years.

Lesson: Don’t put off to tomorrow to whom you can convert to today.

St. Ignatius of Loyola was a noble soldier. He liked his profession and its legends of chivalry, honor, and bravery. He was good at being a soldier. Then a cannon ball came over the castle wall at Pamplona, shattering his leg and his military career. Through an enforced convalescence and multiple attempts to repair the leg (breaking and resetting it in a pre-anesthetic age) Ignatius began to consider his life. Left with a library that only had religious books, he began to ask himself not whether his previous aspirations of chivalry and bravery were as wrong as they were misplaced, because the bar was set too low. Why not fight for Christ? The result was the founder of a religious order, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) who, at least in their glory days, were the Church’s “spiritual marines” in preaching conversion and change of life to the ends of the earth.

Lesson: Take your best and most noble intentions—and aim higher.

St. Camillus de Lellis, another soldier, was a gambling addict. He founded a religious order dedicated to the care of the sick.

St. Rafał Kalinowski also made his way in advanced military teaching circles. He admitted to religious skepticism and a ten-year hiatus from Mass and the sacraments. He would become instrumental in the restoration and reform of the Carmelite order in early 20th-century Poland. One of the people the story of his life profoundly influenced was a guy named Karol Wojtyła, whose own life ended as Pope St. John Paul II.

The Ven. Matt Talbot wrestled with an alcohol addiction and was probably a full-fledged alcoholic by age 13. At 28 and the result of contact with the Church, he “took the pledge” and stayed sober for the next 40 years of his life. Not only that, he undertook a life of prayer and penance as a member of the Third Order of St. Francis.

The catalog of the saints is full of examples of people who were tempted, even sinned, by the same sins you and I face. The means may change, but the primary drivers of evil–pride, envy, anger, avarice, lust, gluttony, and sloth–remain pretty constant.

In invoking “all the saints,” try to find the ones who perhaps best mirror your life circumstances and seek their intercession so that you become one of them.