The Incidentals of Sainthood

Whenever I go to St. John Paul II National Shrine that straddles our seminary’s southern boundary, I marvel at the Polish pope’s achievements. He penned innumerable publications, helped defeat communist ideology in Europe, and became one of the most famous persons of the 20 ^th century. But the most remarkable thing about these worldly accomplishments is that he didn't need any of them. He simply received them. They were secondary and incidental to his single-hearted pursuit: complete surrender to and unity with Christ.

So often I get this backwards. I desire the incidentals of sainthood and not the sainthood itself, making worldly acclaim my primary goal instead of humble submission to God’s will. I desire the saint’s acclaim but not the humility that must earn it.

Such grasping is inevitably frustrated; God can't give His best gifts to those incapable of receiving them. A paradox of the great saints is that their personal acclaim is something they didn’t care about. The acclaim probably came only  because they didn’t care about it. Saints recognize the world’s fame and good opinion of others as a distant second to being known by the Father. This is an essential lesson for a seminarian.

Desiring saint-like acclaim without saint-like sacrifice can create an obsession with the hollow, surface-level success that plagued the Pharisees in Matthew’s Gospel: “You cleanse the outside of cup and dish,” Jesus told them, “but inside they are full of plunder and self-indulgence.” (Mt. 23:25) The Pharisees are a flagrant example, but the temptation exists in seminary too.

Each weeknight, a seminarian gives a 2-4 minute reflection before house dinner on the day’s readings. It was my turn a few weeks ago. During my holy hour the day before, the doubts crept up:  What if your reflection doesn’t sound smart? What if people don’t think you’re insightful? Surely a promising future priest would have something more interesting to say. My focus turned from real encounter with God in prayer to fretting about my appearance.

Seminary dinner reflections are unimportant. It’s a safe bet that the temptation to worship the opinions of others is stronger when the stakes are higher—as a parish priest, bishop, or pope.

This is one reason why seminary must never be a trade school.
It’s not a place where a man goes to learn the skills and mechanics that make him look like a priest or sound like a saint. The most important formation happens far below the surface—a continuous conversion to Christ at the level of the heart. Our rector encourages “brutal sincerity” in spiritual direction. Such radical transparency obliterates the temptation to keep formation surface-level and favors a substantive change in a man that many on the outside won’t see in the short term.

The most beautiful image I have heard for the priesthood is preaching as nothing else than the overflow of the interior life. The overflow is the result of real encounter and relationship with God that changes a man for good. This cannot be done in reverse; a man cannot preach effectively if he does not first know God, no matter how much he desires the incidentals of good priesthood—being respected by parishioners, for instance.

It was the same for St. John Paul II, whose interior overflow crashed like a tidal wave onto the shores of the world’s souls. He could never have changed history or won fame in the way he did if he grasped at those incidental outcomes as ends in themselves. But because he followed the example of Christ, he received them in abundance: “Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped at.” (Phil 2:6-7)