What is a saint?

Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines a saint as a “holy person.”

However, we’re already hearing a lot of baloney about Mother Mary from people keen to play down her holiness.

Yesterday a chappie on the South Australian Catholic Church payroll told the media: “The thing about Mary is she’s a bit more vibrant, she’s not a goody-two-shoes type figure . . . .”

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Cringe.

Are we so afraid of the notion of holiness that we must pretend that even true saints — who have given their whole lives to sacrificial devotion in the hope of becoming holy — are not really holy at all, but are, in fact, just a little bit like us?

Are we determined to domesticate even this greatest and holiest and most God-centred and prayer-centred Australian of all time, and make her ordinary – so that we, in our state of personal decay and feeble compromise, need not feel embarrassed or challenged to change ourselves?

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Pope John Paul II warned against this: “Dear friends: Mary MacKillop cannot be understood without reference to her religious vocation . . . Mother Mary of the Cross did not just free people from ignorance through schooling, or alleviate their suffering through compassionate care. She worked to satisfy their deeper, though sometimes unconscious, longing for ‘the unsearchable riches of Christ’.”

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Here is a prayer that Mother Mary MacKillop used in her personal devotions:

“I resolve, with the help of God’s grace

to die any kind of death,

or to suffer any kind of pain,

either of mind or body,

or any other affliction that can befall me,

sooner than for one moment to commit a deliberate and known sin

against God’s love,

and the claims he has upon my duty and service. 

Hitherto I have sadly forgotten my great end . . .

I will come back to thee, my Eternal Father . . .

Let me not prove a coward in thy service. 

Let me love to be humiliated and persecuted,

so that I may, during the remainder of this short life,

remain as near to thee, my Jesus,

in the thickest of the strife,

as in thy Divine Wisdom thou art pleased to permit.  Amen.”

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Holy Mary MacKillop, Saint Mary of the Cross, traditional Catholic, please pray for us.