Why aren't there more lay saints?

Comment from a reader on my previous post:

Just out of curiosity does anyone have any idea why excluding martyrs there are so few 'lay saints/blesseds'? The last time I counted I could only come up with seven, and three don't really count (St. Monica and Blds Louise and Marie Martin were the parents of Saints).

Interesting question. First of all, I wouldn't say that parents of saints "don't count." Presumably the assumption is that they only "got in" because of their kids. I think it is the other way around, that without the saintly parents we would not have had the saintly kids. So I would say that Louis and Marie Martin, as well as Monica, can stand on their own.

Also, if we want to be nitty-gritty specific, we would have to say that most of the Church's saints are probably laity in the strict, older sense of the word, inasmuch as the "laity" is distinguished from the "clergy." A layman is anyone who is not part of the hierarchy; i.e., does not have holy orders. By this very general definition, St. Francis, St. Benedict and every nun would be a lay person. The above definition of the laity is taken from the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, but Lumen Gentium 31 defines the laity as "all the faithful except those in holy orders and those in the state of religious life specially approved by the Church." This is today the more common colloquial sense of the word, and essentially means "a normal person" or somebody not a priest or religious. Fair enough. Let's look at some of the Church's canonized/beatified saints and blesseds, excluding martyrs like St. Thomas More and St. Justin.

St. Helena, d. 330

St. Monica, d. 387

St. Edwin, d. 633

St. Wenceslaus of Bohemia, d. 935

St. Vladimir of Kiev, d. 1015

St. Henry, Duke of Bavaria, d. 1024

St. Stephen I of Hungary, d. 1038

St. Edward the Confessor, d. 1066

St. Margaret of Scotland, d. 1093

St. Louis IX of France, d. 1270

St. Catharine of Genoa, d. 1510

St. Juan Diego, d. 1548

St. Dominic Savio, d. 1857

St. Gemma Galgani, d. 1903

These are just a few of the sainted lay persons I can think of off of the top of my head; I'm positive there are more, especially if we count those like St. Bridget of Sweden who began as lay persons, lived their lives in the married state and then ended up as religious towards the end of their lives. If we take into account the beati (like the parents of St. Therese), I'm sure the list is much, much greater.

However, there are a few caveats with the above list. Of the fourteen saints listed, one, Monica, is the parent of a saint. One, Juan Diego, is a visionary who received an extraordinary apparition. Neither of them can really be called "normal" people. Then, nine of the remaining twelve were royalty. This doesn't mean they "don't count," but it means that they can hardly be said to have been "normal" people like you or I. They were the heads of states, known far and wide for their piety and devotion, but with the resources and freedom of kingship at their disposal with which to practice their faith. Most of us do not have private chapels, access to saintly confessors 24/7, royal alms set aside for charity, and great halls for receiving and clothing all the poor in our cities. Therefore, while the saint-kings are excellent role-models for rulers, they can't be said to just be "normal" people, though they certainly are lay people.

That leaves us only three: Catharine of Genoa, Dominic Savio and Gemma Galgani. From this list, we can strike out Dominic Savio and Gemma Galgani, both of whom would have become a priest and religious respectively if ill health had not carried them off.

Thus, we are left with St. Catharine of Genoa, who on my list at least, is the only lay-saint whom you could say was a normal, average person. She came from an upper-middle class family, got roped into a crappy marriage, spent a lot of years offering up her miseries until finally she and her husband experienced profound conversions, thereafter working together to care for the sick.

So, while on the one hand we can say that there are quite a few lay men and women who are saints, we also must add that there are not a lot of "normal" people who are saints or blesseds. Why is this?

Well, I could offer the politically-correct answer, which would be that this is due to the fact that the Church represses the laity in order to secure the power of the greedy clergy and that there really is no difference bewteen the lay and clerical states, and that the sooner we recognize this the sooner we will see more "down to earth" sanctity among the laity.

Or, I could give you the non-politically correct but I think more accurate answer as to why there aren't more lay saints: because they laity aren't that holy. Let's look at this.

A saint is one who strives for Christian perfection and attains some recognizable level of sanctity in this life. Christ told us the way to attain this perfection:

If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come follow me (Matt. 19:21).

Here we have Christ's program for sanctity, and the origin of the evangelical counsels. What we can take from this is that a person is said to be a saint to the degree with which they conform their life to the evangelical counsels in imitation of our Lord.

But fulfillment of the evangelical counsels to the fullest extent necessarily implies a rejection of the world, even the things about the world that are good in and of themselves. This has been the basic understanding of pursuing holiness in the Catholic Church since day one. Pursuit of holiness in any serious way is usually connected with a very real and intense renunciation of the world.

Now, Lumen Gentium, however, says this of the laity:

What specifically characterizes the laity is their secular nature...the laity, by their very vocation, seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of God. They live in the world, that is, in each and in all of the secular professions and occupations. They live in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life, from which the very web of their existence is woven...they are tightly bound up in all types of temporal affairs...(LG 31)

I'm not denying any of this is true, which it certainly is. But here is the problem - how can a class of people, who "by their very vocation" are "tightly bound up in all types of temporal affairs" have a real chance at attaining a level of sanctity that, by its nature, demands a renunciation of worldly entanglements? It is extremely difficult.

I am certainly not saying that lay people can't be personally holy, but I am saying their state in life makes it extremely unlikely that the "average" person will attain the level of sanctity necessary to be beatified or canonized.

That is why any vision of a renewal of the Church that depends upon the laity stepping up and becoming holy independent of any renewal of vocations or institutional holiness of the priesthood or religious orders is bound to fail. Separated from the holiness of the hierarchy, the laity will not attain any holiness all, but will end up professing a kind of sham social-justice activism in place of it, as we see already professed by many even at the Diocesan level. You can't just take the approach of "well, listen here laity, we don't have any priests anymore, so you're all going to have to step up to the plate and do your part." It won't work.

Here's how you get a holy laity. First, get some holy priests , religious and bishops, who can fulfill the evangelical counsels and become truly saintly. Then, expose them to the people and watch grace do its perfect work.