Called Out of Darkness Page 0,23

wrote her own autobiography, a book with which I struggled pretty much in vain.

St. Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians, was fabulously interesting, not only because she was beautifully pictured with an organ or a harp, but because she had been a valiant martyr, and her persecutors had tried, without success, to suffocate her in her lavish Roman bath. Sometimes the sufferings of the saints were too much for me. I shuddered when I read about St. Lawrence being roasted alive. I questioned my own courage in the face of his example. I preferred to read the colorful adventures of saints like Francis of Assisi who accomplished great things without the necessity of a bloody death.

I also chipped away, during those years, at The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, and at The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius but gained very little, and went back to the narrative adventures of heroism that never failed to carry me along.

There was St. Alphonsus, who had founded the Redemptorist Fathers of our parish. And St. Elizabeth of Hungary, who had given so much to the poor. There was St. Lucy, whose eyes had been put out during her martyrdom.

And St. Agnes, who had died a martyr as well. There were saints from all periods of church history, and this included our own times. St. Therese, The Little Flower, had lived only a short time ago. And most recently, St. Maria Goretti, a lovely young Italian girl, had died rather than give up her chastity to an attacker, and had been canonized by Pope Pius XII.

We all wanted to be like Maria Goretti. We would have died rather than give up our chastity, of course.

But I hungered for something beyond martyrdom - the greatness of St. Francis of Assisi, leaving his rich father, to found the Franciscan Order and reform the entire church. I hungered for a spectacular life of extraordinary triumphs, and I don't think I understood anything really about obedience or humility in terms of this sort of life. The idea for me was to be exceptional, to be great.

All these saints had their emblems or tokens, and many of their statues filled our churches. St. Rita, a tall dark-clad nun, always had the wound in her forehead, through which she suffered willingly for Christ. I remember standing in front of her statue in the back of St. Alphonsus Church and praying to her in the hopes that she would help me to love suffering, which in fact I intensely disliked.

St. Catherine, the martyr, was always pictured with a wheel. St. Lucy, her eyes miraculously restored, held the first pair on a plate. We visited her statue in St. John the Baptist Church and prayed to her there. St. Teresa of Avila held a feather quill because she was, on account of her writings, a Doctor of the Church. St. Agnes, in the small holy pictures we treasured, always had her lamb beside her. And St. Louis of France, perhaps my favorite at one time, was pictured with his golden crown, as he had been the king of France.

On the corner of Josephine Street and Constance Street, one-half block from St. Alphonsus Church and right across the street from St. Mary's Church, stood the "holy stores," or two shops that sold statues, rosaries, and holy pictures. And I loved collecting these holy pictures of the saints.

When I was about twelve, I persuaded my father to clean up a little unused room on our back porch, and to paint it so that it would become an oratory for me, like the oratory used by St. Rose of Lima in her family garden in Peru.

My father did a wonderful job. I remember he painted the walls a beautiful shade of gray. And I put up lovely gilded holy pictures all around the walls of this little room. I spent time in it praying. I was trying to be a saint.

In school, Bible history at some point gave way to church history, and this held my interest because of the high level of incident and the narrative flow.

I lost the real thread of what was happening, but I recall spectacular events like the Greek Schism when Eastern Catholics split off from Roman Catholics, and also the time of the Babylonian Captivity when the pope did not reside at Rome; there came a troubled time when there were three men claiming to be popes. At some point, St. Catherine of Siena, one of the greatest