Butler's Lives of the Saints (Volume 1)

Saints belong to the whole history of the church but are especially visible today. One of the most visible legacies of the papacy of John Paul II has been the acceleration and multiplication of processes of beatification and canonization, mainly of figures from the recent past - martyrs under Nazism and Communism, for example. They also reflect the new universality of the Church, including more men and - increasingly, with belated justice - women from the New World and the Third World. These trends are reflected in this volume. It provides a fresh consideration of one saint or blessed for daily reading, selected mainly from among those in the new full edition of "Butler's Lives of the Saints" - with a few more recent examples. The aim is to give a simple, factual presentation of flesh and blood figures. This is also seen as the most truly devotional approach, drawing on Alban Butler's original insight in presenting saints as examples rather than intercessors: 'In the lives of the saints we see the most perfect maxims of the gospel reduced to practice". This is indeed true: if the saints and blessed collected here share one overarching characteristic it is to have put their love of God to work for their fellow men and women as they saw fit - through austerity of life, contemplative prayer, or a myriad embodiments of what we would now call social work. They are holy and examples to us because they lived and died for others, for us.