As we commence a Catholic Jubilee Year, a 725-year-old tradition of our faith, we eagerly await the canonisations of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901-1925) and Blessed Carlo Acutis (1991-2006) as part of the Jubilee’s focus upon the Christian life as a pilgrimage toward the Lord, the source of our hope.
These two Italian teenagers, one an avid mountaineer celebrated for his charitable outreach to the poor and the other known for his Eucharistic devotion, are powerful symbols of holiness for our twenty-first century.
In a time when the church wrestles with the varied meanings of “synodality,” and in which voices on the nature and style of the church can be at odds, they are for us clear and concrete paradigms of the universal call to holiness as the essential vocation of the church, the end to be served by the varied vocations, offices and structures that form and order the People of God.
Both soon-to-be-saints underscore the principle that holiness is the goal of our Christian pilgrimage, a project to which we are intrinsically called, and yet at the same time a goal that we cannot achieve or fulfil by our own efforts.
Blessed Acutis recognised this necessity of grace for holiness in his writings and in the experience of his own personal suffering (“The more we receive the Eucharist, the more we will become like Jesus, so that on this earth we will have a foretaste of heaven”) as did Blessed Frassati at the beginning of the century prior (“Will I have the strength to persevere all the way? In the face of this pang of doubt, the faith given to me in Baptism reassures me of this: by yourself, you will accomplish nothing, but if you place God at the centre of all your actions, then you will reach the goal.”)
Living on either side of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the witness of these two young men bolstered and express “the universal call to holiness” taught by that sacred Council. The Council affirmed in the fifth chapter of its reflection on the church, Lumen Gentium, that the gift of grace and union with Christ given at baptism is also a vocation—a personal work that the People of God exercise by the sacramental character given to them at initiation and through a life of active discipleship, “They are justified in the Lord Jesus, because in the Baptism of faith they truly become sons of God and sharers in the divine nature. In this way they are really made holy. Then too by God’s gift, they must hold onto and complete in their lives this holiness they have received” (LG 40).
In decisive terms the Council upheld, “All the faithful of Christ, of whatever rank or status, are called to the fulness of the Christian life and the fullness of charity” (LG 40). Each is called to union with Christ and this gift of love must be alive in us all—it is this love or charity which will guide us to our end or destination as pilgrims (LG 42).
This universal call to holiness has an esteemed history in the church’s tradition, even if Catholics have been more or less aware of this principle at various times in its history. It has also been a contested idea at various points with multiple voices contributing to its refinement.
For one, the immediate backdrop of the Council’s teaching on the universal call to holiness included vigorous debates about the character of Christian perfection or holiness, specifically the accessibility, or otherwise, of “mystical contemplation” as the height of the normal development of grace in the Christian life.
While today this may seem a rather rarefied or even lifeless topic of debate, the possibility of mystical contemplation in the life of the baptised speaks directly to the heart of Christian spirituality: the very possibility of spiritual perfection for all Christians in the concrete condition of their life, whether they be a layman working in the fields or a contemplative living in the monastic cloister.
Following the trauma of the Protestant Reformation, some exclusivist tendencies developed in Catholic culture which saw Christian perfection, including the possibility of mystical contemplation, as the preserve of religious and clerics alone. In the polemical atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation era, the anxiety to accentuate those distinctive features of Catholic faith, including the priesthood and religious life, over and against the egalitarian spirit of the Protestant threat led to the depreciation of the laity and the cocooning of ‘holiness’ and “perfection” to the presbytery, convent and monastery. It resulted in a restricted, two-tiered view of holiness that endures in some circles and cultures of piety even today, despite its fundamental variance with Christian tradition.
Ironically, one of the great contributors to the recovery of the universal call to holiness was Pére Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, known as the “sacred monster of Thomism” who opposed other theological currents that informed the Second Vatican Council. The significance of Garrigou-Lagrange’s spiritual theology to the Council and its teachings has largely been overlooked for two reasons. The first is that the French-born Dominican died in 1964, a year before the close of the Second Vatican Council and did not participate in the conciliar preparations owing to ill health. The second and perhaps most pertinent contributor to this oversight is that the defining achievement of the Second Vatican Council has and continues to be identified with “the surmounting of neoscholasticism,” a theological movement of which Garrigou-Lagrange was the undoubted exemplar and figurehead.
As a result, Garrigou-Lagrange became identified with the ancien regime and his polemical style and disputes with contemporaries such as Maurice Blondel, Henri Bergson, Jacques Maritain and his former student Marie-Dominique Chenu earned Garrigou-Lagrange a reputation for theological inflexibility and a proclivity for condemnation.
Nevertheless, in his seminal text Christian Perfection and Contemplation According to St Thomas Aquinas and St John of the Cross, written in the late 1930s, Garrigou-Lagrange identified with lasting insight the way in which many of the baptised were tempted to the bare minimum in Christian life. They avoided sin perhaps but did little to commit themselves to the active pursuit of holiness through a life of prayer and charity, a devout sacramental life, spiritual reading and apostolic service. Garrigou-Lagrange counselled instead, “the soul ought always to progress instead of remaining stationary; just as a child ought always to grow in order not to be stunted.”
This insight remains invaluable to our own times and the Jubilee Year into which we have been invited. For Garrigou-Lagrange, the remedy for a somnolent church was to awaken all Christian people to the full perfection of charity that beckons as call and responsibility in each state of Christian life: “All ought to grow in charity, each according to his state of life, whether it be that of a simple layman, a secular priest, or a religious; in other words, each according to his condition.”
Garrigou-Lagrange rejected the notion of a two-tiered view of the Christian life, one “ordinary” and the second “extraordinary” by its very nature and, as such, inaccessible to the majority of the baptised. In this defence of tradition, the French Dominican found support in Matthew 5:48 (“Be perfect… as your heavenly Father is perfect”) as well as in the writings of St Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, St Thomas Aquinas, John Tauler and St Francis de Sales. He warned that if the mystical life was confined to a separate and “extraordinary” way of life – and thus of interest only to the few – the majority of Christians would be left without urgent motivation for, or any expectation of, full perfection understood as mystical union with God. Garrigou-Lagrange would have it that no limit should be placed on the Christian’s progress in the spiritual life which reaches its proper end in the grace of mystical encounter with the Lord.
In this present Jubilee Year, we have been gifted with the witness of two young soon-to-be-saints who have soared to these very heights of holiness on the currents of grace. These “Blesseds” have made the fundamental call to holiness concrete for us in our own time, each in their distinct time and each by their own way. In Blessed Frassati we find faith and daily events “harmoniously fused” as Pope John Paul II would put it, an adherence to the Gospel translated into loving care for the poor and the needy. In Blessed Acutis, we find a mystical appreciation of the Eucharistic mystery, a luminous life offered for others by being first offered to God. As Garrigou-Lagrange affirmed, and the Second Vatican Council would after him, while the classes and duties of life are many, “holiness is one” and for every pilgrim in the Lord (LG 41).
 and Blessed Carlo Acutis (1991-2006) as part of the Jubilee’s focus upon the Christian life as a pilgrimage toward the Lord, the source of our hope.){kind=link}