This is our second reflection for the feasts of All Saints and All Souls about American “Saints on Their Way,” the Seton Shrine’s museum exhibit and ongoing initiative to highlight the causes of Americans on the road to sainthood, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Mother Seton’s canonization.
When you become a saint, you don’t become less yourself. You become more yourself.
Fifty years ago St. Elizabeth Ann Seton became the first native-born American to be canonized. There are now eleven canonized American saints—three of whom were native-born; the others lived and ministered in the United States.
And there are more on the way. Some 87 Americans are now on the road to sainthood; they are Blessed, Venerable, or Servants of God.
You can see in these holy Americans how saints become more fully themselves.
You see it in the bespectacled face of Blessed Miriam Teresa Demjanovich in 20th century New Jersey, who wrote “Greater Perfection,” a spiritual work that continues to inspire, and in the welcoming gaze of Mother Henriette Delille, who experienced the Church through Creole culture in 19th century Louisiana.
You see it in Joseph Dutton, the Vermonter who overcame his personal demons to volunteer to help Father Damien care for his Molokai flock for 44 years before dying in 1931 at the age of 87. And you see it in Michelle Duppong, the North Dakota college evangelization leader who carried a painful cross of cancer before dying on Christmas day, 2015, at 31 years old.
“You were made to be a saint,” Duppong said, summing up Vatican II’s universal call to holiness. She’s right: The holier you are, the more fully yourself you become, and vice versa.
Who you are, your personal identity, starts with your body.
The Church teaches that soul and body are one. We don’t just have bodies; as persons we are bodies. All sorts of American bodies are on their way to sainthood: Black bodies and European bodies; elderly bodies and young bodies; large bodies and small bodies.
There is Bishop Alphonse Gallegos, who was raised in Albuquerque and walked the streets of Los Angeles to reach gang-members and migrant youth. There’s the formerly enslaved hairdresser Pierre Toussaint from Haiti who bore witness to the faith in New York — and there’s the former grocer and Union soldier Father Nelson Baker from Buffalo who for more than fifty years cared for the poorest in Lackawanna.
There is the half-smile of child saint Charlene Richard of Lafayette, La., who devoted herself to prayer after reading a book about St. Thérèse of Lisieux and died at age 12 in 1959. Then, there is the giant smile of Father Aloysius Schwartz of Washington, D.C., who died in 1992 after a long life of missionary activities inspired by “Boy Commandos” comic books.
All of these bodies together make up the Body of Christ. As saint-on-her-way Dorothy Day put it, “We are one flesh, in the Mystical Body, as man and woman are said to be one flesh in marriage.”
The region you are raised in also determines your personal identity.
Since human beings are soul and body in one, our physical place matters a great deal. Our region, as one Catholic writer said, is “inside us as well as outside us.”
Saint-on-his-way Father Simon Bruté never forgot his French homeland, serving in Maryland and Indiana as “a subject of St. Louis.” Bavarian Father Francis Xavier Seelos embraced the Midwest despite his struggles with “insects, the religious sects, the language and so many things more.”
Some “Saints on Their Way” felt mismatched even in their own native lands. Father Augustus Tolton was raised in the “Negro Quarter” of Quincy, Ill., on the Missouri border, and struggled to fit in as the nation’s first acknowledged Black priest in Chicago. And Father Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin was a European Aristocrat who became a priest and moved to America against his family’s wishes, dying in the wilds of Pennsylvania.
Wherever they come from, saints learn that, like Our Lord, they have nowhere to lay their head on earth. Brother James Miller was born in Wisconsin, learned Spanish, and was martyred in Nicaragua. He knew his true Fatherland lay elsewhere. So did the first Puerto Rican to be beatified, “Blessed Charlie” Rodríguez Santiago, who saw his true origin in the pre-dawn Resurrection of Christ. His tomb says, “We live for that night.”
Saints on their way come from all levels of education and from every social class.
Mother Mary Lange was an educated Black immigrant who spoke French, Spanish and English, who persevered despite resistance from 19th-century leaders. In 20th century California, Cora Louise Yorgason, with minimal formal education, became a mystic and convert to the Catholic faith from the Mormon Church after seeing heavenly visions.
Dominican foundress Rose Hawthorne Lathrop was born the year after her celebrated father, Nathaniel Hawthorne, published The Scarlet Letter. Father Walter Joseph Ciszek was born in a working class family in Pennsylvania but lived his vocation in Russian gulags. Father Vincent Copadanno left college in the Bronx to become a missionary living his vocation out in Taiwan and Vietnam.
Each of them saw their duty the way Rose Hawthorne did: “To take the neediest class we know — both in poverty and suffering — and put them in such a condition that if our Lord knocked at the door I should not be ashamed to show what I have done.”
If you could meet saints on their way you would find every personality imaginable.
You would meet loquacious TV priest, Fulton Sheen, and the taciturn foxhole priest, Emil Kapaun. You would meet Sister Mary Thea Bowman, who spoke boldly, breaking into song and directing the bishops to cross their arms and hold hands, and you would meet the stoic Father Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus.
Father Edward Flanagan, the founder of Boys Town who Spencer Tracy played in the movie, was described as a man with a “big personality” that made him known and loved worldwide. But not Guatemala martyr Father Stanley Rother. He was described at his beatification as “an ordinary man from Oklahoma. But God chooses the ordinary.”
Saints were truly themselves — and wanted to restore the true selves of those they met.
The Holy Healer Father Solanus Casey was a Wisconsin Man who was known as the Doorkeeper because he was always available for visitors at his friary, listening deeply to their problems, trying to understand the source of their pain.
In Canada, Mother Élisabeth Bruyère also wanted to release the human beings in her care from suffering. “Their distress cries out. Must we not at least try to relieve it?” she asked.
Their goal was to release people from the pressures that drove them away from their true dignity in Christ.
“Become who you are” is a phrase often attributed to St. John Paul II. It gets to the heart of his understanding of the universal call to holiness.
Saints on their way show that becoming who you are doesn’t mean never changing — quite the contrary.
Becoming yourself means stripping away the parts of your ego that thwart God’s will for your life.
For Elizabeth Ann Seton, becoming herself meant going from being a Protestant mother to a Roman Catholic celibate foundress. It meant being a New Yorker in Maryland living a life formed by the Eucharistic spirituality of Northern Italy under the religious constitution of an order founded in France.
In other words, it meant constant change, and constant self-revision — but not revision according to her idea of who she was, but God’s.
In short, she did what the Catechism says God made her for: “to reproduce the image of God’s Son made man … so that Christ shall be the first-born of a multitude of brothers and sisters.”
That’s the story of holiness told by the lives, words, and devotion of the “Saints on Their Way.”
TOM HOOPES, author most recently of The Rosary of Saint John Paul II, is writer in residence at Benedictine College in Kansas, where he teaches. He hosts The Extraordinary Story podcast about the life of Christ. His book What Pope Francis Really Said is now available on Audible. A former reporter in the Washington, D.C., area, he served as press secretary for the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee Chairman and spent 10 years as editor of the National Catholic Register newspaper and Faith & Family magazine. His work frequently appears in the Register, Aleteia, and Catholic Digest. He lives in Atchison, Kansas, with his wife, April, and has nine children.
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