Ours is the Church of the saints

from The Heroic Face of Innocence, "Joan, Heretic and Saint," by Georges Bernanos:

"Who does not long for the strength to set out on so glorious an adventure? For sanctity is an adventure; it is indeed the only adventure. Those who have once realized this have found their way to the very heart of the Catholic faith; they have felt in their mortal flesh the shuddering of another terror than the terror of death: the shudder of supernatural hope. Our Church is the Church of the saints. But who worries about the saints? We want them to be old, full of experience and worldly wisdom; and most of them are children. And childhood is alone against everyone. The know-alls shrug their shoulders and smile: what saint ever had much to say for the Churchmen? But what have the Churchmen got to do with it? What contact with the most heroic among mankind has Mr. So-and-so, who is convinced that the Kingdom of Heaven can be won like a seat in the French Academy, by treating everyone tactfully? God did not make the Church for the prosperity of the saints, but that she might hand down their memory; He made her that the world might not lose, with the divine miracle, a torrent of honor and poetry. What saints have the other churches? Ours is the Church of the saints. Whom would you entrust with the charge of this flock of angels? History alone, if left to itself, would have crushed them with its harsh, restricted realism and its summary methods. Our Catholic tradition, without harming them, sweeps them into the full flood of its universal rhythm. They are all there -- St. Benedict with his raven, St. Francis with his lute and his Provençal songs, Joan with her sword, Vincent with his shabby soutane -- and the newcomer, so strange, so hidden, invoked by contractors and simoniacs, and smiling her incomprehensible smile -- Teresa of the Child Jesus. Would one have wished them, during their lifetime, to be kept in glass cases, addressed in rounded periods, knelt to, honored with incense? Such things are all right for Canons. But the saints lived and suffered like us. They bore the full weight of their load, and many of them, without relinquishing it, lay down under it to die. Those of us who dare not yet take to ourselves what was holy and divine in their example, can at least find in it a lesson in heroism and honor. But is there one among us who would not blush to stop short so soon and leave them to follow the endless stretch of road alone? Is there one who could wish to spend his life pondering the problem of evil rather than dashing forward? Who will refuse to liberate the earth? Our Church is the Church of the saints. The whole vast machinery of wisdom, strength, supple discipline, glory and majesty, is of itself nothing unless it is animated by love. Yet the lukewarm turn to it only for a guarantee against the risks of the divine. No matter! The smallest little boy in the catechism class knows that the blessing of all the Churchmen put together can only bring peace to those who are ready to receive it -- the souls of good will. No rite can dispense us from loving. Our Church is the Church of the saints. Nowhere else could one even imagine the adventure -- an adventure so human! -- of a little heroine who one day passed quietly from the stake of the Inquisition to Paradise, under the noses of a hundred and fifty theologians. "If we have reached the point" (wrote Joan's judges to the Pope) "where sorceresses who prophesy falsely in the name of God, like a certain female taken prisoner within the diocese of Beauvais, are better received by the thoughtless populace than are their pastors and doctors, then all is lost: religion will perish, faith will fail, the Church will be trodden underfoot, and the iniquity of Satan will prevail throughout the earth!" ... And behold, rather less than five centuries later, the image of the sorceress was exposed for veneration in St. Peter's in Rome -- painted, it is true, as a warrior, and without tabard or divided skirt! -- while a hundred feet below her, Joan might have seen, lying prostrated, the tiny figure of a man in white, who was the Pope himself. Our Church is the Church of the saints. From the Pope down to the little altar-boy drinking the wine left over from the cruets, everyone knows that there are not many famous preachers in the Calendar -- not many priest-diplomatists. The only people to question this are the respectable believers with stomachs and gold chains, who think that the saints are in far too much of a hurry, and who would like to go to Heaven with decent deliberation, just as they walk up to the church-wardens' pew, with the parish priest for company. Our Church is the Church of the saints. We may respect the Commissariat Service, the Provost Marshal, the staff officers and the cartographers, but our hearts are with the men on ahead; our hearts are with those who get killed. There is not one of us shouldering his burden -- his country, his job, his family -- not one of us with our grief-worn faces and our roughened hands, with the unending boredom of our daily life, of daily bread to be fought for, and the honor of our homes to be defended -- there is not one who will ever have enough theology to become even a Canon. But we have enough to become saints. We can leave it to others to administer the Kingdom of God in peace. We have our hands full already, wresting each hour from the day, one by one, with vast labor -- each hour of the interminable day, until that looked-for hour, that unique hour, when God will deign to breathe upon His exhausted creature. O radiant Death, O true dawn! Let others look to the spiritual side of things, argue about it, legislate about it; it is the temporal that we hold in both our hands: we hold in both hands the temporal Kingdom of God. We hold the temporal heritage of the saints. For there were blessed along with us the corn and the wine, the stone of our thresholds and the roof where the dove build her nest; with us were blessed our poor beds full of dreams and forgetfulness; the highroad down which the country carts go squeaking; the young men with their pitiless laughter, and the maidens weeping at the fountain's brink. And ever since then -- ever since God Himself has visited us -- is there anything in this world which our saints should not have taken back: is there anything at all which they cannot give?"