Catholicism: The Pivotal Players

Christ demands a decision. Will we serve him or some other master? A soldier who became a mystic and eventually the founder of the Society of Jesus, commonly called the Jesuits. St. Ignatius’ decision to give his life over to Christ without reservation gave rise to a movement that would not only transform lives, but also changed the world.

A brilliant academic, Catholic prelate, writer, evangelist, and television personality, Fulton J. Sheen was also a mesmerizing public speaker, endowed with extraordinary oratorical gifts, a charming sense of humor, and a magnetic personal presence. At the height of his fame, Sheen’s radio program, The Catholic Hour, had an audience of four million and his television show Life is Worth Living was viewed by an estimated thirty million people each week. He had the courage and the imagination to use the new media in the mid-twentieth century to engage a world growing increasingly skeptical of Christianity.

St. Augustine of Hippo is possibly the best example of how faith in Christ changed a person. Born into a wealthy family with a Christian mother and a pagan father, Augustine lived a life focused on career and sensual pleasures before meeting St. Ambrose, who convinced him that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. Augustine’s narrative of personal transformation in his book Confessions provides a template for life in Christ that still rings true today.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton is one of the most sparkling and effervescent figures in the great Catholic tradition. A physically large man with an even larger intellect and imagination, he embodied the wealth and capaciousness of Catholicism. If one is ever tempted to see Catholic Christianity as something cramped, crabby, and puritanical, he should read even one paragraph of Chesterton. Reading Chesterton is a bit like opening a bottle of champagne: intoxicating, sparkling, rare. Which words can best describe Chesterton’s take on the world? Joyful, playful, rambunctious, joking, realist, traditionalist, balanced, and sane. He felt that something had gone dreadfully wrong with the modern world and that classical Christianity would set it right.

Catarina Benincasa, known to the world as Catherine of Siena, is one of the strangest and most intriguing of the church’s saints. An uneducated woman from an ordinary family, she became, in the course of a very short life, an object of fascination to thousands and a counselor to kings, queens, and Popes. Though she never studied theology and never learned formally to read or write, she came to be recognized as a doctor of the church and a master of the spiritual life. Her mystical connection to the higher world—she spoke to Christ, Mary, and the other saints as casually as one friend talks to another—constitutes a powerful challenge to the flattened out secularism of our time. She witnesses to the deeply biblical truth that the higher world and this world are not separated by a terrible gulf, but rather interact, inter-penetrate.

Is there a more winsome and beguiling figure in the entire history of the Catholic Church than Francis of Assisi? Even for non-believers, Francis seems to sum up what is best in the Christian tradition, and it would be difficult to find anyone—even the most ardent of atheists—who would stand against him. Il Poverello, the little poor man—simple, humble, close to nature, deeply in love with God—continues to sing across the ages to our own cynical time.