After the initial version of this post, I was kindly asked by a fellow saint to reconsider my words about other traditions' approach to the saints. Taking that request as guidance from the Spirit (and helped along by suggested further reading into our various traditions), I retract my early post and re-work it to present the following. Thanks for reading, for listening, and for pushing back.
If you read my earlier post and were offended or injured by it, then I would gladly hear from you so that I can apologize and seek reconciliation. That is, after all, what this whole project is about.
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Last Friday we had a thorough, wide-ranging, and challenging discussion about saints. In spite of the many anecdotes I hear from members of our congregation, we didn't have any dyed-in-the-wool Catholics at the table. We had a couple few who had childhood memories of Catholicism (Catholic school, Catholic catechism classes), but not many people who were life-long Catholics now centering their Jesus-walk in the Episcopal Church.
The conversation and research was interesting enough, though, that I thought I would process some here for broader consumption.
"Saint" in the Catholic Church (and, to a different extent, in the Orthodox Churches) is a special category of person. The special category of "saint" as a "hero of the faith" is a departure point between Catholic and Protestant (Moravian, Presbyterian, Baptist, etc) Churches. Most if not all of the Protestant streams of faith interpret "saint" only according to the basic definition of the Greek word (hagios) in the New Testament applied to all believers in Jesus Christ. To believe in Jesus as Lord sets one apart, makes one holy. "Hagios" means "holy," so all Christians are "saints." They are saints not because they are miraculously or conspicuously good, as our common definition of the word indicates, but because their discipleship to Jesus Christ makes them holy, or different from the rest of the world.
A word about titles before I go on. Christians who participate in the Church under the authority of the Bishop of Rome (the pope) call themselves "Catholic." Most other denominations call that segment of the Church the "Roman Catholic" Church, because the word "catholic" means universal and they consider themselves part of the universal Church. But the (Roman) Catholics I have known do not use the term "Roman" in their name because, well, they are the universal Church. So I suppose from here on (at least in this post) I should use "catholic" to refer to the universal Church (all Christians) and "Roman Catholic" to refer to those under the authority of the pope.
In the Roman Catholic Church, a "saint" is someone who has led an exceptionally good life, usually accompanied by verified miracles, often accompanied by martyrdom (choosing death instead of renouncing the faith.) Being officially recognized as a hero of the faith, or "canonization," means that Roman Catholics may both look at them as exemplars and "invoke" them, or ask for them to pray in heaven for believers' concerns.
One can go down quite the rabbit hole of Roman Catholic theology in understanding the saints, including journeys through canonization, the differences between honoring, serving, venerating, and worshipping, beatification versus sainthood, and so on. If you'd like to do so, I recommend starting with the Catholic Encyclopedia at
NewAdvent.org. (Start with the entry for "Canonization.") The Bellarmine Forum (
https://bellarmineforum.org/) also has well-explained information about Catholic theology.
The Anglican Church (and, generally by extension, the Episcopal Church) has considered itself to be the "middle way" between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. It has a governing structure and liturgy very much like the Roman Catholic Church, but sits under the Archbishop of Canterbury (within the Anglican Communion) rather than the Bishop of Rome. It has formally rejected invocation of the saints, but still regards saints as exemplars of the faith whom the living should emulate. (For a deeper Episcopal dive,
see here.)
[The family tree has even more branches of course: In the 19th century a group of Anglicans believed that the Anglican Church had gone
too far away from Roman Catholic spirituality, and started a movement a little to the RC side of Anglicanism called Anglo-Catholicism. For more on that, see
this congregation's website. It's fascinating.]
In the present Church's American mash-up of traditions, members of any given congregation may come from, or still embrace, elements of faith characteristic of very different branches of the family tree. (Witness this Reformed author serving an Episcopal congregation.) I suppose this makes for a fascinating opportunity to crawl out of our fish bowls and see what it's like outside the water we've been breathing so long.
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It is interesting that Paul, writing to the Church at Corinth, says, "be imitators of me" (1Cor4.16). He says it again at 11.1: "be imitators of me, as I am of Christ." It is accurate to describe the goal of the Christian life to be imitating Christ. And if the life of another believer helps us to take another step toward Christ, then we give glory to God for it.
May our lives, as well, so reflect the light of Christ that others are drawn to that source and seek to live in its rays.
love,
emrys
