Pope Francis said yesterday that it takes saints to reform the Church and for this each Catholic is called to a deeper “second conversion.”
“It is the Holy Spirit who forms and reforms the Church and does so through the Word of God and through the saints, who put the Word into practice in their lives,” Pope Francis said Jan. 15.
In this new year we will present more saints to be models for us in our everyday life, with its joys and sufferings. Their life experience might not be identical to ours, but something that we can relate to. In studying the lives of the saints may we all be inspired.
Striving for holiness means trying to become the particular saint that God created us to be: responding to the challenges of our own time, using our own talents and admitting our own limitations and weaknesses.
To quote Thomas Merton: There is only one thing for anybody to become in life. There’s no point in becoming spiritual – the whole thing is a waste of time. What you came here for is to become yourself, to discover your complete identity to be you. But the catch is that of course our full identity as monks and Christians is Christ. It is Christ in each of us… I’ve got to become me in such a way that I am the Christ that can only be the Christ in me. There is a Louis Christ that must be brought into existence and hasn’t matured yet. It has a long way to go.
The question is, what is our own path to holiness? As (soon to be canonized) Charles de Foucauld said, “Which is my road to heaven?”