The Power of Christ: Saint Paul vs Caesar

We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

    The boxer Robert Fitzsimmons, who was slated to fight the much larger James J. Jeffries in a heavyweight title match in 1902, supposedly quipped: “The bigger they come, the harder they fall.”  While Fitzsimmons failed to demonstrate the truth of his remark on that occasion (he lost the bout to Jeffries in the 8th round), it has become something of a proverb.  How many times have we seen that the more formidable the opponent, the more dramatic the impact when he comes crashing down?

    The nascent Church faced just such an opponent in the days after the ascension of Jesus, an opponent much more formidable than James Jeffries and Robert Fitzsimmons put together.  This man “was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison” (Acts 8:3).  Not satisfied with terrorizing the followers of Christ in Jerusalem, “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, [he] went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem” (Acts 9:1-2). And yet this man, Saul of Tarsus, reached Damascus a very different man, because on the way he met the Risen Christ:

Now as he journeyed he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed about him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" And he said, "Who are you, Lord?" And he said, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting; but rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do." The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. Saul arose from the ground; and when his eyes were opened, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. (Acts 9:3-8)

“Oh what a fall was there!”, as Shakespeare’s Mark Antony says of the death of Caesar.  And when Saul fell to the ground it was indeed a great fall, one which the Church commemorated yesterday, as it does every January 25th, as the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul.  Saul, of course, later calls himself Paul, and goes on to become Saint Paul. While both might have been great falls, each in its own way, Saul's was a very different fall than Caesar's.  Caesar pursued greatness to satisfy his own ambitions, and any lasting good that came of it was simply a happy consequence God’s working everything for good (see the quote from the same St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans at the top of this post).  This working for good  took a very different form in the case of St. Paul himself. When Paul arrives in Damascus the Lord tells a man named Ananias to “come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight” (Acts 9:12).  Ananias has heard about Paul, and is afraid of him, but the Lord assures him that “he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel” (Acts 9:15).  Unlike Caesar, who lived only for his own glory, Paul now lives for the Glory of God or, as he himself puts it: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). While Caesar's fall was the end of his life ("Now die, Caesar!"), Saul's was the beginning of new, more glorious life.

The laying on of hands: Joseph Ratzinger (later
Pope Benedict XVI) is made a cardinal

    Likewise, any power that St. Paul and the other Apostles wielded was very different from the sort of power that Caesar fought for.  Caesar’s power died with him under the jealous daggers of conspiratorial senators, and it would take almost two decades of ongoing civil war before another man, his great-nephew Octavian, seized supreme command in the Roman Empire and had himself proclaimed Augustus, the first emperor.  It generally happened that emperors after Augustus gained power through violence and bloodshed, and lost it in the same way.
St. Paul, on the other hand, was simply a conduit for the power of Christ, who tells him "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor 12:9).  It is a power that comes from outside of him, which was before him, and which continues after him.  We can see this in the fact that yesterday’s feast of the Conversion of St. Paul is usually followed by today’s memorial of Saints Timothy and Titus, just as Timothy and Titus themselves followed Paul (since today is a Sunday, we are not observing the customary feast of Timothy and Titus).  St. Paul made both men bishops by the laying on of hands, just as Ananias had laid hands on him, and wrote letters addressed to both that are now included in the canon of Sacred Scripture. Timothy and Titus likewise passed the power of Christ on to other bishops.  This power is still working through our bishops today, centuries after the bodies and the power of the Roman Emperors have crumbled into nothing.

    The bigger they come, the harder they fall.  We all fall at some point in our lives.  Let us pray that we fall not like Caesar, in a futile pursuit of worldly ambitions, but like St. Paul, born to a new life in Christ.

December 24th, 1969: Fr. Ratzinger speaks . . .

Fr. Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) delivered the following address on German radio 50 years today, on Christmas Eve 1969:

“The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods; nor will it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves. To put this more positively:

The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality. Unselfishness, which makes men free, is attained only through the patience of small daily acts of self-denial. By this daily passion, which alone reveals to a man in how many ways he is enslaved by his own ego, by this daily passion and by it alone, a man’s eyes are slowly opened. He sees only to the extent that he has lived and suffered. If today we are scarcely able any longer to become aware of God, that is because we find it so easy to evade ourselves, to flee from the depths of our being by means of the narcotic of some pleasure or other. Thus our own interior depths remain closed to us. If it is true that a man can see only with his heart, then how blind we are! 

“How does all this affect the problem we are examining? It means that the big talk of those who prophesy a Church without God and without faith is all empty chatter. We have no need of a Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly superfluous. Therefore, it will destroy itself. What will remain is the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church that believes in the God who has become man and promises us life beyond death. The kind of priest who is no more than a social worker can be replaced by the psychotherapist and other specialists; but the priest who is no specialist, who does not stand on the [sidelines], watching the game, giving official advice, but in the name of God places himself at the disposal of man, who is beside them in their sorrows, in their joys, in their hope and in their fear, such a priest will certainly be needed in the future. 

“Let us go a step farther. From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly it will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion. Along-side this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly. But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize the sacraments as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.

“The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. One may predict that all of this will take time. The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain — to the renewal of the nineteenth century. But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

“And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

-Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, 24 December 1969

The Last Sunday of Advent (Lo, How A Rose E'er Blooming)

Nativity With The Torch, Nain Brothers

  The beautiful hymn "Lo, How A Rose E'er Blooming" (originally the 16th century German song "Es Ist Ein Ros Entsprungen") is one of my favorite songs of the Advent Season.  It draws its inspiration from the following Messianic passage from the Prophet Isaiah:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. (Isaiah 11:1-2)

In Isaiah’s time the Davidic kingdom had been destroyed, and the people of Israel were living in exile.  Nonetheless, it was clear to the Jewish people that the Prophet was speaking not only of their return to their earthly homeland and the rebirth a truncated  political entity: he was delivering God’s promise that, when things looked most hopeless in this world, He would send a Savior, his Messiah, to usher in a Kingdom greater that any conceived by mere men. In this song the “shoot” (the Messiah Jesus, descended through his human mother Mary from King David, Jesse’s son) is depicted as a lovely Rose, a small but vibrant manifestation of God’s presence where all seemed dead:

It came, a flow'ret bright,

Amid the cold of winter,

When half spent was the night.

     In the Season of Advent the Church reminds us that God has also promised to send his Messiah again in glory at the end of time.  This past year has given Catholic Christians plenty of reasons to feel that our world is collapsing, and that we are living in a sort of internal exile (we need not go into specific details here).  Our Hope will not be realized in this world, but only in the New Jerusalem in the world to come.

     For this reason, we look to the Blessed Mother as our model, who staked  her life on trusting in the promise of an angel. And so the song invites us to join her in gazing on the Rose springing from the stump of Jesse:

With Mary we behold it,

The virgin mother kind;

To show God's love aright,

She bore to men a Savior,

When half spent was the night.

May the remainder of your Advent be a blessed one, as we waith in hope for the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ!

The Lord is close at hand - come, let us worship Him

Passion Sunday: Pick Up Your Cross

Passion Sunday     

Today’s liturgical observance is officially called “Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord.”  The name reflects the dual nature of the liturgy, as the Mass is preceded by a procession with palms in commemoration of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, but the readings include one of the Gospel accounts (this year St. Mark’s) of his arrest, trial, and crucifixion.

     My “inner Pharisee” is sometimes tempted to think that this pre-figuring of Good Friday before the fact  is much like the practice of moving Ascension Thursday to a Sunday in order to catch people who can’t be bothered to show up in church on a week day, but that is not the case.  Even if there weren't many people who have jobs that won’t allow participation in the Good Friday liturgy, or are kept away for other reasonable causes, there are good reasons to turn to the events of the Passion before the Triduum, and the practice goes back further than one might think.  Prior to Vatican II the second Sunday before Easter was known as Passion Sunday (as is still the case, of course, in the Extraordinary Rite), which introduced the Passiontide, a two week period of more intense focus on the suffering and death of Jesus; in combining it with Palm Sunday, we have actually moved Passion Sunday a week closer to Good Friday. Christ’s self-sacrifice at Calvary is one of the most important events in the Liturgical Year, and really one of the most significant events in all of human history, so it is fitting that we don't just pass over it in a day or two. Placing the Passion at the center of this Sunday’s liturgy gives the direction for the rest of Holy Week, so that we’re already in the proper frame of mind before we reach the culminating events of Holy Thursday and Good Friday

     Combining Passion Sunday with Palm Sunday also gives us an interesting and, I think, fruitful perspective on the events leading up to the Crucifixion.  Very many, at least, of the people singing “hosanna” as Jesus rode into Jerusalem were not cheering for the real Jesus but for a fantasy Messiah who, they thought, would be a very worldly savior.   Many of these same people, most likely, were calling for his crucifixion a few days later.  Moving from the Palms to the Passion in the same liturgy helps drive home that reality for us, and our participation in both ends of the process reminds us (or should, at least) of our own complicity in the Crucifixion of Jesus (for more on this point, see my post “Palm Sunday: Who Are Those Cheering People?”).

     Too often we try to take shortcuts to rewards of various kinds without doing the hard work that those rewards require; today we are reminded that if we want Christ as our King, we need to pick up our cross and follow him.

Killing Is Not Compassion

There has been a lot of attention recently to the push to legitimize abortions up to and even, in some cases, after birth. Less visible, but no less relentless, is the ongoing campaign to make death the legal remedy to any number of complaints at the other end of the the life cycle. It seems a good time to bring back this Worth Revisiting post first published 5 February 2017.

To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him . . . (Deuteronomy 30:19-20)

True Crime Story?

    Imagine you’re reading a book, or watching a film.  In this story a caregiver, a trusted figure, secretly puts a sleep-inducing drug in the coffee of an unsuspecting person under her care.  Once the victim is no longer conscious, the perpetrator tries to administer a more powerful drug, a lethal drug.  The victim wakes up and, clinging to life, fights back.  The caregiver calls upon accomplices (from the victim’s own family, no less!) to restrain her, and forcibly administers the deadly injection. Sounds like a crime thriller, doesn’t it?  But wait, there’s more . . . here the story changes from a crime thriller into a Kafkaesque dystopian nightmare. The deed comes to the attention of the authorities, who conclude that the killer should indeed go to trial . . . but not to punish her wicked crime.  Rather, despite conceding the lurid details above, they conclude that she “acted in good faith”, and seek a trial in order to establish a legal precedent that other health care providers may likewise kill unknowing, and even unwilling, persons without fear of punishment.

Healer, or killer? (detail from painting by Mikhail V. Nesterov)

    As you may have guessed, the scenario above is in fact a true story, which recently took place in the Netherlands, as detailed in this article from LifeNews.com. The only major detail left out of my retelling, and the only thing (at least in the minds of the Dutch Review Committee that investigated the case) that makes what appears to be an act of unspeakable wickedness into a “good faith” medical procedure, is the fact that the victim was suffering from dementia.  As more and more places are following the Netherlands along the path of the legalized killing of the old, infirm, and, increasingly, those who are simply unhappy, it would be wise to take a look at cases like this to see what lies ahead.

In the Eyes of the Law

Prof. Theo Boer (Daily Mail photo)

    The case above is a chilling illustration of how, once we cross the line of giving legal sanction to the direct taking of innocent life, we unleash a force beyond our control, in which the “logic” of death overwhelms supposedly rational considerations.  Let’s start with what Dutch law provides for, and see how it compares to what actually happened in the situation above.  Theo Boer, a professor of Health Care Ethics at Kampen Theological Seminary in the Netherlands recently published an article in the British Catholic Medical Quarterly explaining why he no longer favors the pioneering Dutch law allowing physician assisted suicide. We’ll get to his reasons in a moment; first I’d like to take a look at his summary of the law in question.  Pr. Boer explains that, according to Dutch law:  

-1. “First, there should be a request from the patient” - There was no such request, and in fact, according to an article in the UK’s Daily Mail,

. . . the patient said several times ‘I don’t want to die’ in the days before she was put to death, and that the doctor had not spoken to her about what was planned because she did not want to cause unnecessary extra distress. She also did not tell her about what was in her coffee as it was also likely to cause further disruptions to the planned euthanasia process.

-2.  “there should be unbearable suffering without prospect of improvement” - The daily Mail tells us that “she often exhibited signs of fear and anger, and would wander around the building at nights. The nursing home senior doctor was of the opinion that she was suffering intolerably”, but  adds that “she was no longer in a position where she could confirm that the time was now right for the euthanasia to go ahead”. In other words, in the subjective judgment of outside observers her life was no longer “worth living”; other facts in the case indicate that the person living that life didn’t concur in that judgment.

-3. “the doctor should inform the patient of his situation” - demonstrably no.

-4. “doctor and patient together should have come to the conclusion that there is no acceptable alternative” - again, manifestly not.

-5. “the doctor should have consulted a colleague” - it is unclear from the Daily Mail article whether the “senior doctor” is the same who administered the lethal injection, but it is likely that more than one doctor on the staff participated in discussing the case.  If so, this is the one and only point on which the doctor would seem to have complied with the actual requirements of the law.

-6. “The assisted dying should take place in a medically sound manner” - well . . .

. . . secretly drugging a patient, then forcibly injecting her as she fights for her life doesn’t fit my standard of sound medical manner, but others may have a different opinion. In any case, the attending physician incontestably violated provisions 1,3, and 4 of the law, arguably number 2 and, if one is to take a civilized view, number 6 as well.  Setting aside for the moment the morality of any such law (I’ll get to that), the doctor euthanizing this patient blatantly flouted most of the specific provisions of the law. How in this world is it possible that the Review Committee would not only bless the doctor’s efforts, but would also be so confident that the courts would agree?

Gospel of Life

    To answer that question, I suggest we go back to St. John Paul II’s Encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), published in 1995, six years before the passage of the Dutch assisted suicide law.  St. John Paul, in speaking of both legalized abortion and legal euthanasia, wrote (my bold):

The end result of this is tragic: not only is the fact of the destruction of so many human lives still to be born or in their final stage extremely grave and disturbing, but no less grave and disturbing is the fact that conscience itself, darkened as it were by such widespread conditioning, is finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between good and evil in what concerns the basic value of human life. (Evangelium Vitae 5)

St. John Paul II

In other words, not only are the acts themselves immoral and unjust, but they tend to corrupt the moral understanding of society as a whole, and consequently the morals of everyone in it.  Why should we expect anyone to honor the specific provisions of man’s laws if we no longer recognize the legitimacy of the moral law, God’s Law, itself?

    There is a clear pattern to the way this corruption works in concrete instances, which we can see in the legal history of contraception and abortion over the past century: The rare, extreme case is offered as an exception to a ban on something that had previously been considered intrinsically wrong; once the line has been breached, however, there is no longer any reason in principle to deny to others what was at first permitted to only a few.  If it’s not wrong for married couples experiencing certain difficulties to use contraception, why should it be wrong for others? If it’s not murder for one woman to abort her baby, how can it be so for another? We have now seen the same thing happen here in the United States with marijuana laws: first only “medical” marijuana for people with glaucoma and other conditions, but followed in short order by the general lifting of restrictions.  We should expect that, once rare “hard cases” have been used to legitimize legal euthanasia, the killing will become increasingly more commonplace, and “acceptable” in an ever wider range of situations.

It Can’t Happen Here . . . Can It?

    Pr. Boers details how this exact thing has happened in the Netherlands with assisted suicide and direct euthanasia.  The law was proposed to apply to people who were suffering late-stage terminal illness and suffering extreme pain.  Before very many years, those people became the exception to the rule:

. . . what was once considered a last resort, now becomes a default mode of dying for an increasing number of people. The unbearable character of the suffering is lesser described in terms of physical suffering and more in terms of ‘meaningless waiting’.

    In fact, most of the people requesting euthanasia aren’t dying at all:

Whereas in the first years hardly any patients with psychiatric illnesses or dementia appear in reports, these numbers are now sharply on the rise. Cases have been reported in which a large part of the suffering consisted in age related complaints. Loneliness occurs in 50 out of the last 500 cases that I reviewed before stepping back. Many of these patients could have lived for months, others for years or even decades. We have seen a number of ground breaking cases: ‘euthanasia for two’, for example couples in which the caregiver gets cancer and his partner chooses to die the same day and the same way; euthanasia in blindness; euthanasia for a man with autism who fears retirement; assisted dying for a mother of two suffering from tinnitus. Undeniably, assisted dying for one group of patients leads to demands from others.

    Similar results are reported in Oregon, the first US state to legalize assisted suicide, and in other states that have followed since.  There, the most common reason given is the abstract, amorphous "loss of autonomy" (see chart below). Less than a third cite pain (and not all of those are actually experiencing pain: for some it is only fear of possible pain). In fact, the most common factor among those seeking assisted suicide is not pain or terminal illness but depression, a treatable, non-fatal condition.  Studies conducted in both the United States and the UK indicate that over 90% of those seeking assisted suicide are suffering from mental problems. Nevertheless most of these people receive no psychiatric assistance prior to their death.   In fact, we have seen in the United States, and Pr. Boer reports the same in the Netherlands, that the doctors who preside over these deaths often have no professional relationship at all with their patients, and sometimes don’t even know them.

The Law as a Teacher

    The idea that “The Law is a Teacher” is an old one, going back at least to St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians.  So what does a law permitting killing people because they are old or sick teach us?  Surely it sends the message that human life is not sacrosanct, but instead something that can be disposed of when it becomes difficult . . . and if difficult lives are expendable, then why not inconvenient lives?  And where do we go from there?  St. John Paul explains that:

It is a problem which exists at the cultural, social and political level, where it reveals its more sinister and disturbing aspect in the tendency, ever more widely shared, to interpret the above crimes against life as legitimate expressions of individual freedom, to be acknowledged and protected as actual rights.  (Evangelium Vitae 18)

    Pr. Boer, in language strikingly like that in the passage above, confirms that such has in fact been the case in the Netherlands, saying that “there is a shift in public opinion. Whereas in the beginning assisted dying was seen as a last resort, public opinion is shifting towards considering it a right” (my italics).  Boer goes even further, however, adding:

. . . public opinion is shifting towards considering it a right, with a corresponding duty on doctors to act. A law that is now in the making obliges doctors who refuse to actively refer their patients to a ‘willing’ colleague.

The Culture of Death

Dance of Death by Venne Adriaen Pietersz

   We can expect the pressure on doctors to participate in killing to grow more intense in jurisdictions that have legalized euthanasia.  The idea of such killing as a legitimate good likewise puts pressure on family members to seek it for loved ones who may be unable to ask for it themselves (which may have been a factor in the Dutch case discussed above), and also on those who are themselves suffering to “spare” their relatives the trouble of caring for them.  This very concern is among the most cited reasons given by those asking for assisted suicide or euthanasia.  And so we see the corrupting power of sin: doctors, who have dedicated themselves to healing, are increasingly compelled to do the opposite and kill; close family members see themselves in mortal conflict with those whom they love . . . and killing off grandma becomes little more exceptional than "putting to sleep" the family dog.

    That’s the future that’s in store for us if we continue down the path of killing as a remedy for suffering, old age, and mere ennui.  We can look forward to more and more people implicated in ever greater acts of injustice, and ever wider waves of corruption spreading throughout society as a whole.  As we can see from events in the Netherlands this is no longer conjecture, but, in many places, a reality, a reality famously described by St. John Paul II as a "culture of death"  (Evangelium Vitae 12). The people who are relentlessly pushing Death as the solution to a myriad of problems will try to paint killing as “compassionate”, but the truth is very different. Killing is not Compassion.     

St. Vitalis, Love & Human Traffficking

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published 16 January 2016. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

When a man dies, his life is revealed.

Call no man happy before his death,

for by how he ends a man is known.  (Sirach 11:27-28)

Back when I was new to the world of bloggery I published a post which I called "St. Julia of Corsica - A Saint For Our Times." And, of course, she was a timely saint. As it happens, every time I write about another saint, I find myself wanting to title the post the same way: "St. [Fill In The Blank], A Saint For Our Time", or " . . . A Saint For Today". And it stands to reason, because sanctity, a reflection of the Eternal God, has a universal quality about it: every saint has something that all the rest of us who hope to rest their hearts in the Lord want to find. At the same time, every Saint is a distinct individual, and sometimes by identifying with some of the unique aspects of a particular Saint's life, their sanctity seems a little less remote, and therefore a little more attainable, for ourselves. For just that reason we have Patron Saints and devotions to particular Saints.
It is also true that the unique stories of particular Saints illuminate specific problems or issues that are still with us today (which is another reason why we have Patron Saints). For instance, earlier this week (January 11th 2016; the scripture quote above is from the same day's Office of Readings) we commemorated St. Vitalis of Gaza. St. Vitalis is venerated both in the Orthodox Churches and in the Catholic Church as the Patron Saint of both day laborers and "ladies of the night" (that is, handy-men and prostitutes: the reasons for both will be made clear below).  His hagiography [Here and Here] tells us that, around 625 A.D.,  when he was already advanced in years, he came to Alexandria in order to minister to the prostitutes.  His method, as described in the brief biography on Catholic.org, was as follows:

[A]fter obtaining the name and address of every prostitute in the city, he hired himself out as a day laborer, and took his wage to one of these women at the end of the day. He then would teach her about her dignity and value as a woman and that she did not deserve to be used by men as an object of their lust.

He followed the same routine every day, and he succeeded in rescuing a large number of women in this way.  Many fellow Christians misunderstood his motives, however, as he insisted that the women he helped not tell anybody about his role in their conversion, or the real reason for his nocturnal visits (presumably these women - and their handlers - only let him in because they believed the he was a paying “customer": if they knew what he really wanted, they would have barred the door . . . or worse).  One righteously indignant young Christian, assuming the worst about Vitalis, struck him a blow to the head that resulted in his death.  Only then, freed from their promises of silence, were the women he had helped to save able to clear his name by their testimony.  

   There are a number of compelling angles to the story of St. Vitalis.  One is that, yet again, we have confirmation that “there is nothing new under the Sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).  The scourge of prostitution is still very much with us and, as St. Vitalis understood fourteen centuries ago, it is a vicious form of exploitation that not only enslaves the body but sickens the soul.  Despite the push in some quarters today to whitewash prostitution with terms like “sex workers”, it is becoming more commonly recognized for the evil it is, and included under the broader heading of “human trafficking” (slavery, in other words).  Nonetheless, not only is prostitution still with us, but it is in fact worse, and more pervasive, than most of us realize.  I recently had the opportunity to hear a talk by Darlene Pawlik, now a pro-life and anti-trafficking activist, but formerly an exploited teen who was first “trafficked” on her 14th birthday. Darlene remained under the control of various traffickers, a virtual slave, for the next several years . . . all right here in United States.  She was eventually saved by turning to Christ, and with the help of Christians who, like St. Vitalis, made it their mission to reach out to the victims of the “sex trade”.  There are in fact many groups today that similarly follow in the footsteps of St. Vitalis, both among Catholics and other Christians as well.

From  http://awakenreno.org/myths-and-facts-about-nevada-legal-prostitution/

    Another point that stands out in the mission of St. Vitalis is his desire to save one soul at a time, like the shepherd in Jesus’ parable (see Luke 15:4) who leaves behind the 99 sheep to recover the one who is lost.  St. Vitalis treated each woman as an individual, and talked to her about her life, and the salvation of her own soul.  He treated each prostitute as a thinking, feeling child of God instead of an object to be used, and he was therefore able to offer real Love, as opposed to the tawdry simulacrum of love they were used to seeing.  I can't help but think, in a way, of St. Mother Theresa of Calcutta, who also insisted on treating each human being like, well, a human being. Secular leftists such as the late Christopher Hitchens criticized her for being an ineffectual sentimentalist: she should have been addressing "The Real Causes" of poverty (capitalism, inequality, etc.) instead of “merely” comforting the poorest of the poor in their distress.  While there is certainly a place for governmental and political action, Mother Theresa understood that laws can't save souls, and that Christ didn’t suffer and die to save us from abstractions, or to establish a perfect political or economic system: he came to save us from sin, through the great outpouring of  His Divine Love on The Cross.

    His Love is still the only thing that can save us from sin.  That’s why so many of us have come to conversion through the example of others, or because of the loving attention of a Christian who, like Christ Himself, showed an interest in us, not as a means to an end, but simply for our own good.  Not all of us are called to start seeking out prostitutes, of course; as the death of St. Vitalis shows, that was and remains a risky undertaking, for a number of reasons.  We can, however, offer material assistance to those who are willing and able to take the risks (perhaps some of the groups linked above), and offer our prayers for their safety and success, and also for the salvation of the exploited women (and men) they seek to help.  We should certainly support appropriate laws to thwart traffickers and to help their victims.
Something every one of us can do is pray, and in this context we could ask specifically for the intercession of St. Vitalis of Gaza. We could ask, for instance, that St. Vitalis pray for our own continued conversion and growth in holiness. We could also pray that he help us recognize the seriousness of sexual sin, including not only prostitution but other varieties of commercial sex such as pornography, and how permissiveness in this area can help create an environment in which a soul-killing evil like the “sex trade” can flourish. Finally, we could ask him to intercede both for the conversion and repentance of the traffickers in human flesh, but, most especially, for the redemption, body and soul, of their victims.

St. Vitalis of Gaza, pray for us, and for all victims of human trafficking.