How the saints teach us the path to salvation

This has been a great week of celebration for us Catholics with the feast days of two doctors of the Church—St Francis de Sales and St Thomas Aquinas—and the feast of the Conversion of St Paul.  All three of these saints have had a profound impact on me over the years and their feast days serve as good reminders to seek their intercession more often. 

St Francis’s gentle and considerate approach to preaching and ministry has been a source of inspiration in my own life.  His motto—He who preaches with love, preaches effectively—reminds us to bring love into each action we take not only for our sake but, crucially, for the sake of others. In this way our actions become a silent, but powerfully effective, way of preaching the gospel of Christ in our increasingly secular society.  St Francis lived during the Protestant Reformation in a largely Calvinist area of Europe.  He undertook a four-year missionary expedition to reach out to them.  His kind and loving approach was so successful that by the end of his mission he had helped 72,000 Calvinists return to the Catholic Church.

Dominican theologian and philosopher, St Thomas Aquinas, produced some of the Church’s most important work, particularly on how to live a Christian life.  His greatest body of work, the Summa theologiæ, is broken up into three parts with a somewhat surprising order.  The first part looks at God and creation.  Christ and the sacraments of salvation, which you may think would follow this, have been held back until the third part.  Centre stage has been kept for St Thomas’s extensive teaching on the moral life.  This “what-how-why” structure of the Summa emphasises that the path from creation to salvation is dependent on how we live our life.  Critically, that path must be one that is guided by caritas (charity, or, love).  St Thomas identifies Charity as “friendship with God” and that our possession of this virtue is the key both to our ultimate happiness and to our salvation.  The greater the possession of the virtue of Charity (through practice), the more profoundly the person enjoys the graces of a stronger union with God, a foretaste of heaven if you like.  This is the ultimate goal for each one of us, the attainment of heaven and the eternal embrace of God the Father.

St Paul’s story is one we are all familiar with.  His great conversion from persecuting Christians to preaching the Good News to Gentiles came after his encounter with the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus.  When Baptism took away the blindness he had incurred during the divine encounter he realised that the promise of salvation lay not in adherence to the Law but rather in friendship with Christ.  And this we know, thanks to our saintly friend, Thomas Aquinas, to be Charity.