Hello people. As you may know, I write a monthly column for Magnificat Magazine called Credible Witnesses. The witness in question has to be a notable Catholic, dead, and uncanonized. His or her cause may have been opened, but the person can’t yet (and may never be) a canonized saint.
I have to submit my proposed list for the following year by June or so and am thinking to canvass you devoted readers for ideas! The range is wide: it can be an artist, a member of a religous order, a layperson, a member of the military, a priest, martyr, stigmatist, factory worker, housewife…but the person has to have done something noteworthy enough so that they’ve been somewhat in the public eye, however small the public. So it can’t be your late Aunt Agnes or your high school chemistry teacher, for example, no matter how worthy those members of your Personal Communion of Saints may have been.
Feel free to reply via comment, or to email me at hdking719@gmail.com. Thank you!
POSTSCRIPT, having rec’d so many generous responses:
Repeat: Person must be DEAD.
Repeat: Person cannot be a CANONIZED SAINT.
Repeat: Person must have had an influence beyond the local, which is why family, friends and cherished parish priests, no matter how holy, are generally not accepted by Magnificat.
Also, I’ve been doing this every month for over ten years so before you take the time to provide voluminous and again generous links and other info, you might want to check to see if I’ve already written on the person
Finally, the person, per Magnificat, has to have operated firmly within, and been obedient to, the Church. Doesn’t mean they can’t have had arguments with the Church, but they can’t have left and gone off on a frolic of their own. It’s definitely a conservative bent, in other words. I have had my own arguments with this, but that’s the way it is, and I can write about people I admire who don’t quite fit into that framework on my own.
Again, a thousand thanks for all your help!
I gave a luncheon talk over the weekend to a lovely group of Catholic women in Denver, Colorado.
I’d never been to Denver, and had only stopped in Colorado once before, when on a cross-country mid-life-crisis road trip, I washed up at Benet Hill Monastery in Colorado Springs for a few nights. It was on the return leg of the journey and I was so wiped out I looked and felt like a member of the Donner Party.
I was in somewhat better shape this time and after flying in from Tucson Friday morning and visiting with the gals, checked into my hotel and set out on an exploratory walk in what appeared to be a miles-long-and-wide corporate office park. The weather was gorgeous–clear, sunny, and though there was snow on the ground, pleasantly warm.
I picked my way across a couple of surface streets that were more like freeways and that I gathered few people navigate on foot, and came upon a Sprouts where I purchased blueberries and sushi for that night’s dinner, and continued on toward an open space I’d found on the map called Bluffs Regional Park. By the time I reached the trailhead, however, the sun was already starting to disappear behind the mountains, and I’d already walked pretty far, so I turned back.
En route, I walked through a vast swath of cookie-cutter houses that had obviously been designed from templates: template Prairie Home, template Craftsman bungalow, template Cape Cod, template 1920s Grover’s Corner house with a porch across the front. They were all attached, I think, or had very little space between them, and thus appeared like pieces you could pick up and move around like on a game board.
Between two rows of these homes that went on and on was open space with the occasional playground or shaded picnic table, obviously engineered to foster community and neighborhood. Which was nice if, again, slightly…programmed somehow.
The idea worked on me. I think a lot about how no matter how immune I think I might be to the relentless cacophony of noise, voices, vitriol, and the attempts to market and commodify every single aspect of our lives from conception to death, the fact is that you can’t really live in the world, and remain completely uninfluenced. All of that rubs off, to some extent, whether we want it to or not, and why would I be any different?
Also I’m so old now that, even though those days are long-gone, part of me is forever back in North Hampton New Hampshire, in the house my father built for us, with my mother sewing my dresses for school, and supper with home-made bread and vegetables from the garden.
They’ve wrecked our food, our clothing, and now our shelter, I thought. Suddenly, in a gully of marshland reeds and grasses, I spotted a flock of red-winged blackbirds, perching and chatting and sending up their sweet, sweet song.
The Kindgom of Heaven is like yeast, all through the loaf.
From a recent substack by Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, called “How the Gender Fever Finally Broke”:
“Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.”
I have no particular desire to be a oontrarian, nor an oddball. It does stike me that as Catholics, though, our conviction should have steered us way, way clear from the gender ideology–an unspeakable violation of truth, beauty, and the human person–from Day One.
The Catholic ladies of Denver, as I said, were lovely. I spoke for a women’s group called Magnificat, and to a person, those present were warm, welcoming, and hospitable. My hostess drove me back to the Denver airport afterwards. Because of the timing of the talk, I hadn’t dared book a flight on the 4 pm back to Tucson (which though I put myself on standby was full), so I had a five-hour layover.
The Denver airport I must say is tip-top. It’s huge, so you can have any number of lengthy walks. (In fact, I researched whether you can walk between terminals, as you can at Dallas- Fort Worth instead of taking the train, but in Denver they won’t let you. Still, you can walk one end of any given terminal to the other which, as my gate changed three times, I had ample opportunity to do).
There were huge windows all around giving on to view of the Rocky Mountains and, eventually, the sunset. I walked for quite a while, and said the Rosary, and later Evening Prayer, watching the faces of the many, many people passing through, and thought about my strange little life which consists in large part, especially while traveling, of putting my own interests, desires, schedule, food preferences, writing, convenience and comfort aside and entering into, being as present as I can possibly be, for and to other people’s lives.
I had no-one with whom to process my trip and my talk, nor did I feel a particular need to process. The Lord was with me, I had poured myself out, given all I had, and done my best. I used to agonize more about whether my talk was “good,” and whether I’d reached anyone, and had my work and pouring out borne fruit? That’s always a fool’s errand. If you break it down, the whole effort would seem senseless and absurd–which is kind of true of most of our efforts. Think how a priest feels! Or a mother….
At the end of the day, if we’re drained, all the better: what else would we do? What else had any of those incredible women done, but been pouring themselves out for weeks, if not months, to put on their luncheon? We all just do our little part, and how grateful I am to be part of it, however small.
Thus, the Kingdom moves forward, incrementally.
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