We are all called to holiness. It is easy to forget that, and easier still to think holiness belongs to other people, in other centuries.
The lives gathered here say otherwise. Servants of God, Venerables, Blessed and Saints: ordinary people who gave themselves to Christ so completely that they drew others to him. St Philip Neri did it with laughter, turning the streets of Rome into a school of holiness. Padre Pio did it in the confessional, hour upon hour. More inspiring still are the young saints and blessed of our own time: Carlo Acutis, who at fifteen did it with a laptop and a love of the Eucharist, and Blessed Chiara Badano, who met cancer with a smile at eighteen and taught us how to carry our cross: “For you, Jesus: if you want this, I want it too.” Each of them shows the same thing: holiness is within reach of all of us. We have only to trust our Lord Jesus Christ and the way he leads us.
This dictionary is meant as a meeting place. Whichever rite a Catholic worships in — the Tridentine rite of the traditional Latin Mass, or the Novus Ordo — it belongs to the one Catholic Church, and what is handed down is what forms the present. Saints old and new are given to form us together in communion with Christ and in his Church. They make the point better than any argument could: the Church is truly universal, and she has gone on raising up holiness in every century, our own included.
So whether you keep the old ways or the new, you are welcome here. May these lives be of use to you, and to anyone you bring to Christ.
They lived wholly for Jesus, through Mary, our Blessed Mother. As she does, the saints and the blessed pray for us before her Son, and we may ask the prayers of the venerable and the servants of God as well. This dictionary is here so that their lives can be known and followed, and their intercession asked before our Lord Jesus Christ.
By a Catholic layman