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As we continue our inquiry as to what it means to be a saint, we need to answer the question: “How does someone become a saint?” The answer depends on precisely what is meant by saint. If saint is taken to refer to simply being united to Christ (and thus a Christian), then the answer is baptism. St. Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 12:13, “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.&rdqu …

Born on the Feast of the Annunciation in 1347, Catherine was the twenty-third child of the wool dyer Jacopo Benincasa and his wife Lapa. From a young age, Catherine was devoted to Christ and the Church. She wished to join a group of third-order Dominican women known informally as the Mantellate or “Cloaked Sisters” and formally as the Sisters of Penance of St. Dominic. The group of laywomen wore a white woolen dress with a white veil and black cape and lived in their own homes. Her family d …

The answer depends on precisely what is meant by saint. If saint is taken to refer to simply being united to Christ (and thus a Christian), then the answer is baptism. St. Paul teaches, “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:13, emphasis added). The one body Paul writes of here refers to the body of Christ (v. 27). Moreover, in Romans 6:3-5, he writes: Do you not know that all of us who have been …

  Having a proper understanding of joy is imperative to becoming a saint.   Joy is the arousal of some sense of good. When we malign and obscure good, we malign and obscure joy. St. Gregory the Great tells us, for example, that (a false) joy may result from another’s misfortune (CCC 2539). The unrighteous presence of envy, in this case, corrupts true joy. There’s a better means of obtaining the joy that comes from the Spirit, and a study of the life of St. Philip Neri rev …

Whatever Happened To Penance And Mortification? Could we imagine what it would be like if athletes stopped training their bodies? It would be unthinkable. Without training they would never have the strength and stamina required to perform. They also would lose their fans, since we respect athletes because of the great feats their training allows them to perform. The same can be said of the saints, the champion athletes of the Faith. They are exemplars not of physical training but of the asceti …