c. 1999 Religion News Service

MOUNT ANGEL, Ore. _ A few are famous. Some are little known outside their own times and places. Many would seem known only to God.

Some died the gruesome deaths of martyrs. Others slipped away in their sleep. But they’re all saints, and they’ve fascinated the faithful and nonbelievers since the first century.

You don’t have to be Roman Catholic, or religious at all, to recognize images of Francis of Assisi in his long brown robes, with a wee bird perched on his finger.

Or Joan of Arc in her armor, a broad sword gripped in her hand. In fact, St. Joan is almost the patron saint of pop culture these days.

CBS spent four hours chronicling her life in an Emmy-winning miniseries last spring, and”The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc”opens in theaters this month with Milla Jovovich as the Maid of Orleans, John Malkovich as King Charles VII and Dustin Hoffman as the Grand Inquisitor.

Francis, with his love of animals, and Joan, with her courage in wartime, are examples of saints whose heroic virtues have transcended the faith that first revered them.

Garden shops sell statues of St. Francis. St. Joan sits on her horse in the middle of an intersection in northeast Portland, Ore. They’re two of the famous few.

But you’d be hard pressed to find even a holy card of Nicholas of Flue, for example, or Ambrose Edward Barlow. The former, a 15th century Swiss statesman, and the latter, a 17th century English martyr, are venerated mostly in their homelands _ and here at Mount Angel Abbey.”The saints live in the ordinary,”said the Rev. Odo Recker, a Benedictine monk who has written a regular column on the lives of the saints for the abbey newsletter.

By”ordinary,”he means the daily liturgies and prayers that are the heart of the monks’ spiritual practice. Each day of the year is a feast day for at least a handful of saints. The prayers of the ordinary name the saints for that day. Often, during the evening meal, the monks take turns reading aloud from the writings of the saints or from the martyrologies, the accounts of the saints’ lives.

Then, too, the Benedictine practice of taking a saint’s name when one becomes a monk keeps the names of the saints on the lips of everyone at the abbey.”Here in the monastery we don’t celebrate birthdays; we celebrate name days,”said Recker, whose namesake is Odo of Cluny, a French monastic reformer who lived from 879 to 942.

The connection to his namesake runs deep in Recker: Odo of Cluny is as real to Recker, despite the saint’s remote time and place, as any modern role model might be. It is because of Odo that Recker, who was a diocesan priest in Ohio, became a Benedictine. It is Odo’s devotion to the Rule of St. Benedict that inspires Recker’s commitment to it. That is the role of the saints, Recker said, to inspire.”The point is to learn a lesson from their lives. That’s what makes the saints people of value for the church,”said Recker, who has been fascinated by the lives of the saints since he was a child.”Stories of their lives serve to inspire the young and the not-so-young to aspire to spiritual greatness. … The saints are heroes of the family of God.” Not all heroes, secular or saintly, make headlines everywhere. Recker is brimming with examples.

Take Ambrose Barlow, one of the 40 martyrs of England and Wales. Born in 1585 in Lancashire, Barlow was a Catholic when Catholicism was outlawed in England. He fled to France, where he became a Benedictine monk in 1614 and a priest three years later. He returned to England and spent the next 24 years in Lancashire ministering secretly to Catholics.

A contemporary writing described him as witty, kind and devoted to the poor. He was arrested four times and released four times before, in 1641, he was hanged, drawn and quartered. His executioners believed that the mutilation of his corpse would bar him from the bodily resurrection they believed was to come.”But the faithful collected the parts,”Recker said,”including Ambrose Barlow’s right hand, which remains incorrupted to this day. It was with his right hand that he forgave and blessed his executioners.” The relics of St. Ambrose are preserved today, his skull at Wardley Hall, the Lancashire home of the Catholic bishop of Salford; his left hand at Stanbrook Abbey in Worcester. His undecayed right hand is among the relics locked in a vault at Mount Angel Abbey, physical reminders of what Recker calls”the ultimate witness.” But not all saints came to such dramatic ends, he said. Nicholas of Flue, a patron saint of Switzerland, is not a martyr but, like Barlow, a lesser known saint with a Mount Angel connection.

Born in 1417, Nicholas belonged to a lay religious group called the Friends of God, who aspired to imitate Christ with lives of prayer and discipline. Nicholas was married, the father of 10 children and active in politics of his day, seeking peaceful solutions to conflict whenever possible.

When he deemed it necessary, he took up arms and went to war. In times of peace, he served as a magistrate and judge.

When he was 50 years old, Nicholas felt called by God to take up the life of a hermit. With the consent of his family, he spent the next 20 years living in a hut on the grounds of Mount Angel’s Swiss motherhouse, Engelberg Abbey.

According to the tradition, he lived on nothing more than the daily Eucharist, or communion, continuing to offer political and personal counsel to all who came to him.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes a prayer of Nicholas of Flue in a section on”The Implications of Faith in One God:””My Lord and my God, take from me everything that distances me from you.

My Lord and my God, give me everything that brings me closer to you.

My Lord and my God, detach me from myself to give my all to you.””He was a very holy man,”said the Rev. Bernard Sander, a descendant of Nicholas of Flue.

Sander, who recently celebrated his 60th year as a monk of Mount Angel, grew up hearing the story of his sainted ancestor from his maternal grandparents. “He was one of the real saviors of his country,”Sander said.”And he spent the last years of his life praying and fasting and being a counselor.” Sander’s personal connection to the saint, he said, has given him one advantage throughout his 81 years:”Hope.” If something as complex as the communion of saints could be summarized in one word, that might be it: Hope. But theologians are hard pressed to limit themselves to single-word summaries.

The Rev. Jeremy Driscoll, a Benedictine theologian who teaches at Mount Angel and in Rome, is no exception. As a theological idea, sainthood is not so simple.

The phrase”communion of saints”is an ancient one in the church, he said, one that might be better translated”communion in holy things.””The early Christians believed that they shared communion with one another in the same holy things, primarily in the Eucharist,”Driscoll said. Eventually, the idea of this communion broadened to mean the communion between people, a communion that Christians believed did not end with death. The canonized, or formally designated, saints are only part of that communion of the baptized, he said.

They are exceptional examples of a much larger group, what the writer of the Book of Revelation called”a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.””The relevance for us today, at least my own experience of it, what I find so beautiful and moving,”Driscoll said,”is that nobody who’s ever lived is ever forgotten in God. With the passage of time, with the passage of centuries, even one is not forgotten. On a statistical level, facts about people fade, but communion with a person does not fade.” (OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS. STORY MAY END HERE.)

That conviction is at the heart of invoking the saints to pray on one’s behalf. But Catholics do not pray to saints as they do to God or to Jesus, Driscoll said.”When I go to Francis and say, ‘Pray for me,’ it is the same way I might ask you to pray for me,”he said.”We feel close to them; they’re like friends to us, which would make no sense if not for the communion in holy things.” It is important to remember, Driscoll said, what makes someone a saint.”Anybody at all who is a saint is not a saint on the basis of what he or she has achieved. Every saint is a saint on the basis of the mercy of Christ.” That, he said, is the thread that unites the lives of Francis, Joan, Nicholas of Flue, Ambrose Barlow _ and all the uncanonized”saints”known only to their families, friends or to God.”Our favorite famous ones are there,”Driscoll said.”Catherine of Siena is there. Francis is there, standing with the nameless multitude. The communion of saints shows the eternal value in the sight of God of every life that has ever been lived. None of it is lost to God. That’s why Catholics remember saints.” IR END HAUGHT