Frank McCourt's Interest in Saints

Saint Francis

I have been researching the lives of saints for a project I am working on. I remember reading about writer Frank McCourt's interest in saints that he found in reading Butler's Lives of Saints at the library in Limerick. While most everything else was a disaster in his life, it seems like his interest in the saints was one of the positives, although McCourt cast it in kind of  cynical way as was his custom. Anyway, when I was reading and listening to the audio version of McCourt's Angela's Ashes (on the way to and from work listening and at night reading), I was struck by his fascination and also remembered my own interest. I too was fascinated by the lives of saints as a child, but hardly remembered it at the time when I was reading McCourt. 

My recent look into several of the saints' lives surprised me because so often our greatest saints were living through miserable times to be a Christian. So many of those we look at were the best of the best, living during horrible God-less kind of times; times when seriously troubling heresies were becoming popular; times when those who were in charge were lax and complacent; and perhaps the worst, times when it seemed like few really cared to be Christian. And by heresies, I mean times when Christians were saying that Christ was not God, but just a good guy, or the devil created the world and everything related to the physical world was evil--series stuff. 

I suppose we live in a time where many challenges exist, but I have to say that I don't think that is unusual--troubled times have happened over and over again. But the good news today is that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. The toughest of times lead to people who become our greatest saints and the tough times lead to periods of great growth. So if you are out there checking the statistics on church attendance, losing sleep over how many kids have no interest in faith, or looking at the media who seems to relish in bad news about the Church--well keep praying--all that will change. It won't be easy. But we are about to experience an era where things will improve. The best of the best will come forward and today's saints will give us all a hand