A Former Protestant Learns to Revere the Saints

Raised Lutheran, I asked my RCIA instructors typical protestant questions about the church: Why should we pray to Mary? Where is purgatory in the Bible? What if I disagree with a   statement made by the pope? Those questions were more important to me than questions about God’s existence or the truth of Christ’s resurrection. Why?

One reason is my liberal arts education at a Lutheran college. There I read from philosophers and theologians like Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, and Bonhoeffer, as well as from atheist thinkers like Nietzsche and Sarte, so I had already been exposed to strong arguments for and against Christianity’s truth claims, and although I abandoned the faith for a while, that intellectual foundation was a major reason I returned to the faith later in life.

But as I said earlier, I was raised Lutheran. My biggest obstacle, therefore, to entering the Catholic church was the years of steady Catholic myths I had absorbed from family and friends many of whom are decent people who meant well. They had simply been taught these ideas by people they trusted, so they believed the myths and passed them on. I was never taught to hate Catholics or to believe they could not be good Christians, but I was ingrained with a sense that Catholics added unnecessary and dubious features to Christian spirituality. Instead of cultivating a relationship with Jesus, for example, Catholics prayed too much to Mary and the saints, venerated the words of a man (the pope) more than the words of Christ, and strangely added things to the faith that were not in the Bible (purgatory).

As a devout Catholic today, I have learned the truths behind the myths, but some ideas, like the inappropriateness of praying to Mary and the saints, lingered with me longer than others. Intellectually I understood and defended the scriptural reasons and the reasons from tradition, but
after conversion, I rarely prayed to a saint. Whenever I tried, a voice from the past would whisper: “why are you praying to a dead person and not directly to God?” Call it a former Lutheran’s guilt.

I continued to study and practice and live the faith as a result, my appreciation for the saints grew. Reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Saint Therese of Lisieux’s The Story of a Soul deepened my own devotion to prayer, mass, and the sacraments, and I soon began to recognize the saints as model Christians, people who best exemplified a life devoted to imitating Christ, and that saints-as-models idea grew in power for me as I began to see evidence for the idea in scripture and began to recognize the idea’s profound significance for our modern world.

Throughout John’s gospel, Christ calls us to imitate Him. And St Paul says to the  Corinthians, “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ,” (Corinthians 1:11). This reading of scripture had a big impact on me. I began to recognize how scripture contrasted good imitation with evil imitation. Christ calls us to imitate Him in charity and humility, to “pick up our cross and follow” Him. In contrast, imitating one another in their hatred of Christ, a mob crucifies Him.

But if Christ calls us to imitate him, then we should see how imitation plays an important role, both good and bad, in peoples’ lives today. We can. For instance, we see bad imitation, for example, in sin. I understand that the word “sin” has lost its resonance for most nonbelievers. When chocolate cake is described as “sinful” in a positive way, you can bet that most people will fail to take seriously the idea of actual “sin” in a religious way; basically, the cheap connotations of that important theological word have rendered it a joke in our modern world, but maybe we can recover a little of the meaning of “sin” by looking at an example of bad imitation. Saint Augustine, in fact, has a brief example of bad imitation in Book 2 of his Confessions. Augustine recounts a time that he was a teenager out with some of his teenage friends:

There was a pear tree near our vineyard, laden with fruit that was not enticing in either appearance or taste. One wretched night…a band of altogether worthless young men set out to shake that tree and run off with its fruit. We took away an enormous haul, not for our own food but to throw to the pigs. Perhaps we ate something, but even if we did, it was for the fun of doing what was not allowed that we took the pears” (Augustine 23).

Notice that the boys do not need the pears to eat; they throw them to the pigs. Augustine and his band of brothers stole simply “for the fun of doing what was not allowed.” Augustine meditates on this seemingly bad but rather harmless incident for a few pages of the Confessions.

Why? Well, he is convinced the incident reflects something deep about man’s capacity to do wrong. Why would Augustine and the boys commit a crime they didn’t need to commit? Augustine writes that “the only thing I tasted from them (the pears) was iniquity…for even if something from those pears did enter my mouth, it was the crime that gave it savor” (Augustine 25).

I believe—Augustine never outright states it—that the crime is committed because of bad imitation. Augustine the teenager follows the group joyfully because their actions mimic each other. Once one boy decides to rob the tree, another boy joins in, then another, and before you know it, all the boys are robbing useless pears and throwing them at pigs because “it was the crime that gave it savor.”

A lot of what I am saying comes from the profound work of Rene Girard, an important Catholic thinker of the 20th and 21st centuries. His study of imitation can be found in important books like Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Reading the Bible with Rene Girard, and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. The last book is Girard’s study of the gospels. In it, Girard points out that Christ prevents bad imitation from occurring in John’s gospel, in the story of the adulteress woman about to be stoned by a small mob, which Jesus prevents. Girard says that “saving the adulterous woman from being stoned, as Jesus does, means that he prevents the violent contagion from starting.” The word “contagion” is apt in that sentence because it illustrates Girard’s point that bad imitation is like a disease that festers and spreads among groups. The scribes and Pharisees who bring the adulterous woman to Jesus in John 8 are all ready to stone the woman.

How does Christ prevent it? He says to them: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8: 7 RSVCE). Christ prevents the breakout of bad imitative sin by provoking the men to drop their stones. They do, and “when they heard it, they went away, one by one” (John 8:9 RSVCE). Notice that Christ converts the once hostile mob to changed individuals—they leave the scene “one by one.”

How does all this relate to the saints? Think back to Christ and Paul’s words that I quoted
earlier. Christ calls for us to imitate him, that the way to live in God is through Christ and Paul
says, “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:11). This chain from God to Christ
to St. Paul extends from the earliest days of the church through thousands of years to the present
day. How?

The lives of the saints. The men and women who have lived most imitatively of the life of Christ, the men, and women who are models of good imitation, a small group heroically in contrast to all those who follow the City of Man instead of the City of God, heroically in contrast to all those who follow the principalities and powers of this world instead of following the cross.

We can follow the saints, of course, through imitation, not of the world, but of Christ, as Saint Maxmillian Kolbe did when he took the place of a condemned man in a Nazi concentration camp or Saint Mother Theresa did when she dedicated her life to the poorest of the poor, or as Saint Monica did when she dedicated her devout prayer life to the hopeful conversion of her son, the future Saint Augustine.

And as Catholics, we can joyfully pray for the grace to conform our lives more to Christ’s life of charity and sanctity. When I was a Lutheran, I was never told to pray for those graces because I was told I was saved already by faith alone. Consequently, in my case, I led a life devoid of charity, a life lived with no discernible moral core.

But through my conversion and my growth in the Catholic faith, through my study of scripture and theology, and the lives of the saints, I have learned to pray daily for the grace to live my faith charitably towards God and neighbor, Christ’s clear instruction for us in Mark 12. I am also grateful that Christ left us His church and the sacraments to help us conform our lives to His will in good imitation of His life.

The church rightfully venerates the men and women who have done that on this earth to the fullest, and today I am eternally grateful to pray for the intercessory prayers of those who pray for us in heaven “with golden bowls of incense, which are the prayers of the saints” (Revelation 5: 9).

Quoted Sources
All scripture quoted from the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition
Saint Augustine: Confessions. Translated by Thomas Williams. Hackett Publishing, 2019.
Girard, Rene. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Orbis Books, 2001.
The quote about the book of Revelation occurs in The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: New
Testament. Ignatius Press, 2010.