The Accidental Saint

Angelo Roncalli was really a very common fellow. His personal gifts and weaknesses were ones that you or I might possess. He did well in school but he was no star. He did not own big homes or have a stunning physique. He was not one of the world's great musicians; he was not a leading theologian in his day; and he always struggled to keep his weight under control. His worldview resulted from being raised by a large Catholic farm family, hardworking but quite average. He sounds like any one of us, doesn't he? And yet, he will be a saint. What does this mean in his life and in ours?

In 1907, he gave a lecture at the seminary in his home diocese of Bergamo in northern Italy. In it, he gave a prophetic description of what it means to be a saint. We tend, he said in that speech, to make saints larger than life, more like figures in a movie or novel than like your neighbors down the street. Saintliness actually results, he said, from learning the art of self-giving love. It flows from dying to self, from laughing at one's own foibles and humbly enduring the foibles of others. Saints aren't so much superstars of holiness as humble sinners, ready to allow God to love them just as they are.