The Saints. Not Perfect, But Pointed in the Right Direction

When Oscar Romero was appointed Archbishop of San Salvador in February 1977, the people who put him there were relieved.

He was cautious. Conservative. A church bureaucrat who had spent his career keeping his head down. The wealthy families who ran El Salvador — who ran the death squads that kept order in El Salvador — considered him a safe choice. He would not cause problems.

Three weeks later, his closest friend was murdered.

Father Rutilio Grande — a Jesuit priest working with poor farmers, speaking the Gospel plainly into the face of poverty — was ambushed on the road and shot. Standing over Grande's dead body that night, Romero was transformed.

He spent the next three years becoming someone no one had expected him to be. He broadcast weekly homilies across the country by radio — the only way to reach people the government was trying to silence. He documented disappearances, tortures, and murders. He stood between the powerful and the poor and refused to move. On the night before he died, he addressed the soldiers who had been ordered to shoot civilians: I beseech you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression.

The next evening, March 24, 1980, a gunman shot him through the heart while he elevated the chalice during Mass.

Pope Francis canonized him (declared him a saint) in 2018. He is also a martyr.

The Catholic Church has never claimed that saints are perfect people. It has claimed something more interesting — that they are fully human people in whom something of God became visible.

Romero was afraid. He said so. What changed him was not a sudden infusion of heroism. It was standing over the body of a murdered friend and deciding he could not look away.

That is the shape of a saint's life. Not sinlessness — direction. A life aimed, even when inconsistent, toward God. And sometimes the inconsistency is part of the story, not the end of it.

Dorothy Day spent her twenties writing about poverty and injustice — covering strikes, marching with protesters, arguing that the poor deserved better. That conscience came before her faith. When she converted to Catholicism in 1927, the conversion did not create her sense of justice. It gave it a home.

She co-founded the Catholic Worker movement and spent fifty years serving the poorest of the poor in the slums of New York — feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, protesting war, getting arrested for it. She struggled with the Church's silence on certain issues her whole life. The journey was not smooth. She kept going anyway.

She died in 1980, still getting arrested, still showing up. The Church continues to investigate her case for canonization (see Glossary). What is not in doubt is the direction of her life. She turned toward God and did not stop turning.

She is not alone in that company. Augustine spent his youth running from God and later described that flight in a memoir of startling honesty — then spent the rest of his life as one of the greatest theologians the Church has ever produced. No single moment of arrival. Decisions, setbacks, more decisions. The saints were not finished products. They were people in motion — sometimes inconsistently pointed toward God.

When we ask a saint to pray for us, we do what any of us do when we ask a friend to pray — except the saint prays from inside the presence of God.

The Letter to the Hebrews puts it plainly: "We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses" (Heb 12:1, NABRE). The saints have not gone anywhere. The living and the dead belong to the same communion of saints — the same community, the same family, still in relationship with each other.

Romero shows what is possible when a cautious man is changed by grief and chooses not to look away. Dorothy Day shows what is possible when someone's sense of justice finds a home in faith — and does not stop growing.

Nobody is asking us to be either of them. The invitation is simpler: notice them. Learn what they did and why. Talk to them if that feels right. Let what happened to them ask something of us.

That is enough to start.

Let us pray. Lord of the living and the dead, thank you for the witnesses you have given us — the ones who failed and tried again, the ones who were afraid and went forward anyway, the ones whose journey was inconsistent but whose direction never changed. When we cannot find our way, let their example be a light. Amen.

Next Tuesday: Of all the saints in the calendar, one stands apart — not because of what she did, but because of who she is. What the Church believes about Mary, and why it matters.

Next Friday: For the Life of the World — Corpus Christi, June 7. The feast of the Body and Blood of Christ.

For Further Reading

A note on sources — Scripture quotations use the New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE), the translation used at Mass in the United States. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) is available free at vatican.va. Church documents cited are also available at vatican.va. Dates in this post use CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era) rather than AD and BC.

On Romero — The fullest short account of Romero's transformation is in the biography Oscar Romero and the Communion of Saints by Scott Wright (Orbis Books, 2010). His final homily — delivered the night before he died — is worth reading in full. His words to the soldiers are among the most extraordinary sentences spoken by any bishop in the twentieth century.

On Dorothy Day — Her autobiography, The Long Loneliness (Harper & Row, 1952), is one of the great American spiritual memoirs. Short, honest, and still in print. For her canonization cause, see dorothydayguild.org. Pope Francis mentioned her by name in his address to the U.S. Congress in 2015 — worth reading in context.

On Augustine — His Confessions, written around 397 CE, is one of the most extraordinary books in Western literature — a man talking to God about everything he ran from and everything he found. The opening line sets the tone: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." Still in print. Still worth reading slowly.

Scripture — Hebrews 12:1-2 names the cloud of witnesses as a present reality surrounding us now. Read it alongside 1 Corinthians 12:12-27, Paul's description of the body of Christ as a single living community that crosses every boundary.

Catechism — On the communion of saints and our place within it, see CCC 946-959. On canonization, see CCC 828. On asking the saints to pray for us, see CCC 956-957.

Church Documents — Lumen Gentium (Second Vatican Council, 1964), Chapter V, The Universal Call to Holiness. The Church does not reserve sanctity for a special class of people. It calls every member to it. The saints are not exceptions. They are examples.

Points to Ponder

For Group Discussion

Romero's appointment came because powerful people expected him to stay silent. Three weeks later everything changed. What conditions in your community make it easy to stay silent — and what would it take for your community to find its voice?

The communion of saints includes the living. We are already part of this community. What difference does it make to understand the community of faith as one that crosses the boundary of death? How does that change the way a parish understands itself?

For Individual Discernment

Romero did not change because of a sudden infusion of heroism. He changed by standing over the body of a murdered friend and deciding he could not look away. Is there something in your own life you have been looking away from? What would it mean to turn and face it this week?

Dorothy Day's journey was not smooth. She struggled and kept going. Is there something in your own life — a call, a commitment, a direction — that you have been inconsistent about? What would it mean to turn back toward it this week, not because you feel ready, but because the direction still matters?

Glossary

Saint — In ordinary usage, a word for an exceptionally good person. In Catholic usage, something more specific: a person the Church has formally declared to be in heaven. The Church's point is not that saints were perfect. It is that their lives show what is possible — and that they are still present, still praying, still part of the same community as the living (CCC 828).

Canonization (kan-on-ih-ZAY-shun) — The formal process by which the Church declares someone a saint. It has four stages: Servant of God, Venerable, Blessed, and Saint. Each step requires investigation, and at the later stages, documented evidence of miracles. The process moves slowly — the Church wants to be sure. Pope Francis canonized Oscar Romero in 2018. Dorothy Day stands at the first stage — Servant of God — with her case now before the Vatican in Rome. In 2021, the Archdiocese of New York sealed seventeen boxes of evidence — her letters, diaries, arrest records, even her FBI file — at a Mass in St. Patrick's Cathedral and sent them to Rome.

Communion of Saints — The Catholic belief that the community of faith includes both the living and the dead — those in heaven, those being purified, and those still on earth. All three together form one communion. The words " communion and community share the same root. The saints have not gone anywhere. We are already part of this community with them (CCC 946-959).

Martyr (MAR-ter) — From the Greek martyrs, meaning witness. A person who dies because of their faith. Romero is a martyr. He died at the altar, chalice in hand, because he would not stop speaking the truth.