Today is the feast of St. Rose of Lima, a Third Order Dominican who was the first person from the Americas to be canonized. She was born Isabel Flores de Oliva in Lima, in the Viceroyalty of Peru, in 1586. She was known most of her life, however, by her nickname, 'Rosa', which she also took as her confirmation name.
The General Calendar has many, many saints, and it is inevitable that patterns arise among them allowing us to give some loose classification to them; obviously there are Martyrs, Virgins, Doctors, and Widows, which are all old categories that go back pretty much to the beginning of sanctoral commemoration. But there are other categories that noticeably begin to show up as history has proceeded. St. Rose is often unsettling to many today, because of the class of saint to which she belongs. She is a saint whose life was a life of what is called Extraordinary Mortification. From a very early age, and consistently through her entire life, she engaged in extreme, and sometimes life-threatening ascetic disciplines. As a girl, she began fasting three times a week and stopped eating meat. She was extremely pretty, and once, having overheard people commenting on the fact, she cut off her hair and rubbed her face with pepper juice until it blistered. For long periods she would only sleep two hours a night, spending the rest of the night in prayer. She had a crown made with spikes that would bite into the flesh of her head. She died in 1617, thirty-one years of age, after a long illness probably in part caused by malnutrition from her fasting practices.
There are a number of saints in the calendar who practiced Extraordinary Mortification, which is interesting in and of itself, because the Catholic Church discourages such practices, and always has. Ascetic practices are good insofar as they aid in cultivation of virtue, but merely increasing the intensity of them does little toward that end, and most Catholic saints who were spiritual directors and advisors have counseled moderation when it comes to them. This goes back to Christ, who criticized the Pharisees for substituting strict practices in place of substantively good actions. And there have been many who have practiced Extraordinary Mortifications who have been condemned for it rather than being placed on the calendar of saints. And yet saints like Rose of Lima are found scattered throughout the calendar.
It is easy to think of the calendar of saints as a list of people to admire and imitate, and this is not entirely wrong, but we naturally tend to understand this in a way that certainly is wrong. Any serious look at the lives of saints will uncover many who would have been utterly exasperating to deal with, and whose lives are simply not of a kind that one would ever choose to hold them up for direct imitation. In reality, people don't end up commemorated at the altar because we like them, or even because we want to be like them. They are commemorated because their lives are lives of manifest victories in seeking to follow Christ. Some of the saints were quite flawed and rough-and-tumble; some were failures, whose lives were nothing but failure; some chose very strange hills to die on; some almost seem to have fallen into sainthood by sheer accident of happening to do one right thing at one right time; some spent their entire lives making life harder for other saints; some seem frankly to have been completely lacking in basic common sense. None of this is admirable or imitable, as such. To be sure, we like our saints flawed, for the same reasons we like heroes in stories to have flaws, but this is irrelevant to the calendar of saints, beyond perhaps capturing the old adage that it takes all kinds to make a Heaven. The one thing all the saints of the calendar have in common is that they wholeheartedly sought to follow Christ, and in some public and obvious way greatly succeeded. We do not put the saints on the calendar because we admire them and want to imitate them. They end up on the calendar because they were publicly victorious; we give them credit for it and seek their intercession, and it is the victoriousness in following Christ that we admire and seek to imitate, not the human, and sometimes all too human, details of it.
Why are there saints like St. Rosa of Lima on the calendar? She is not purely there for Extraordinary Mortification -- she worked extensively with the poor for about a decade, for instance. But there's no doubt whatsoever that Extraordinary Mortification is one of the reasons for it. But she practiced Extraordinary Mortification in such a way as is appropriate to a saint -- however extreme she was at it, she always tried to do it for Christ, and she succeeded at that. That would be enough of an answer. But I think we can also say that it is salutary for such saints to be on the calendar. We all have to engage in some kinds of ascetic practice, some kinds of special, deliberate self-discipline, because developing virtue and cultivating a resistance to temptation requires such things. It is often very difficult. But then you look at St. Rose of Lima. You aren't called to Extraordinary Mortification, but the thing about it is, if St. Rose can go to extraordinary extreme, you can certainly go to moderation. The saints who practiced Extraordinary Mortifications show how far we could actually go, and it is they -- more than any other saints -- who make clear to us how small the obstacles are that we ourselves have to face. They are the saints that show us that the things we have to overcome are hills, not mountains. What could possibly show us better that we have only a little hill to climb, one that is well within our power, than someone who chose to climb a mountain that boggles the mind, not out of necessity but because it was there to be climbed? We are not called to be Rosa de Lima; but Rosa de Lima shows us that we can surely by the grace of God rise to anything that our own call may require of us.
We all are inclined to turn goodness into a flat, saccharine sweetness; everyone, including even moral philosophers and theologians, are tempted to that very grave error. The result is that we consistently underestimate the varied nature of the moral life, and the sheer extremes that moral lives often display, and, trying to fit everything into a small, convenient box, we lose our sense of the actual moral capabilities of a human being. You only maintain the latter by seeing the extremes, all of them, the utter boundaries of what we really can do. People don't want to do that because the extremes are often not pretty. But prettiness is not a moral standard. And one of the great virtues of saints like St. Rose is that if you ever start thinking that the life of a saint is a life of prettiness, she is a saint who does not hesitate to bring out the pepper juice, applied blisteringly to her own life, to disabuse you of such a ridiculous and harmful notion.
