June Newsletter

 

Holiness, my brethren, is the virtue that encompasses all the other virtues. A saint, a mere man, is adorned through it with all the virtues. If a man is a man of prayer and is not compassionate, he cannot be called a saint, and if a man endures all things but has not faith and hope, he does not belong among the saints. A saint is a perfected man, such as Adam was in Paradise; or, still better, a man such as is the New Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ. Here is the Saint of saints. Here is the Sower of sanctity upon the earth and the Guardian of the saints in history. He has revealed to us the ideal of the true saint. He is the prototype of the saints, as he is also the primal image of man. A true man, my brethren, is nothing other than a saint. Saint and man – they are the same thing. He has shown us what it means to be a man and what it means to be a saint. And so His Apostle Peter commands us: Be holy in all manner of living [I Peter 1:15]. A saint cannot be a saint only in one part of his life, but must be so in the whole of it. We must be holy in every part and particle of our lives, so that we may be counted among the saints, among the people who are conformed to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Prototype of the saints and Primal Image of man.