Why do we venerate the saints? Why do we ask for their intercession? In the month of December, I was in Catania to see one of our priests who for some months now has taught at an Institute dedicated to Francesco Ventorino, a priest who was a disciple of Fr. Giussani, an educator of rare wisdom and personality, who had a profound influence in the lives of many people who encountered him. I found myself there around the time of the Memorial of St. Lucy, whose remains returned to Sicily to be venerated, first in Siracusa and then in the other cities of the Eastern coast of the island. This coincidence brought me to research a little bit about the life of this girl who was around twenty years old, killed under the Emperor Diocletian during the last great persecution before the Edict of Milan in 313.
I was struck by the connection of her story to that of another great Sicilian saint, Agatha, who had suffered martyrdom fifty years before her: Lucy, in fact, had gone to Catania to ask her to intercede for the healing of her mother, who suffered from hemorrhages like the woman healed by Jesus in the Gospel of Mark.
Sanctity emanates a contagious power to fascinate because it reveals what we too would like to be
Lucy’s prayer was answered; not only, but she receives the gift of hearing the voice of Agatha who calls her “sister” and invites her to follow through on her intention to consecrate herself to God in her virginity. After returning home, Lucy publicly refused to marry the man who had been imposed on her as husband, a pagan, even though she knew that this choice would have caused her to suffer the same fate as her venerated “sister.”
I found their story illuminating. Above all, it was interesting that already present in the life of the Church of the first centuries was the practice of venerating the saints (and the martyrs in a particular way) and to ask for their intercession, their intervention. What’s more, I was moved by the thought that such a profound link can be forged with them, to the point of arriving at considering each other as brothers and sisters, as Agatha called the young Lucy.
The tradition of the Church has called this link “the communion of saints.” And one of the expressions of this communion is precisely the desire that arises in us to resemble those to whom we entrust ourselves. In the interview given with the curators of the exhibit presented at the Meeting of Rimini on Blessed Franz Jägerstätter and his wife Franziska, their biographer, Erna Putz, declared: “While reading the letters that they exchanged, I thought: ‘I want to be a saint too!’”.
A friendship made human, carnal: this is how the communion of saints begins.
Sanctity emanates a contagious power to fascinate because it reveals what we too would like to be and creates an extremely strong bond with the figures who have lived this experience. Just like what happened to Lucy with Agatha and to Erna Putz with the Austrian husband and wife.
But there’s more. The communion of which we are speaking has an even deeper meaning. The great Alphonsus Maria de’ Liguori, asking himself the question if he should or should not turn to the saints in prayer, wrote that it is God who asks it of us, because He wants us to remain faithful to the method that He Himself has used to let Himself be known and to speak with us. Which method is he speaking of? God made Himself known to man through man. First choosing a few (from Abraham to Moses, from David to the prophets) to be a sign and a word for all. Then sending His own Son, made flesh, so that we might know God through His humanity.
We can call this method “encounter” or else, with a word that is even more human, “friendship.” It is the method used by God with man: to create circumstances, places, facts through which one can have an experience of his friendship within a human and carnal friendship. It is here that begins the communion of saints, in bumping into these places, these facts, these faces and in remaining faithful to them. And this is also the only method of mission that we know.
