2,565 Saints

How would it seem to find oneself in an assembly of assorted saints? Short of going to heaven, the best way to answer that question is to dip into the four lively and curious volumes of Butler's Lives of the Saints, just published in a brand-new bicentennial edition (Kenedy; $39.50). The saints are anything but a dull crowd.

Even in the winding-sheet prose of the Rev. Alban Butler, the saints' often wildly exciting lives and extravagant deaths provided the thriller reading for generations of 18th and 19th century Christians, who did not have the grotesqueries of horror comics and TV. A prodigiously diligent pillar of British Roman Catholicism, Hagiographer Butler labored on his lives for 30 years of spare time and published them anonymously in 1756. The present edition, drastically edited by the late Father Herbert Thurston, S.J. and British Author Donald Attwater, is virtually a new work, contains the lives of 2,565 saints, up substantially from Butler's 1,486.

After the Bible. Some of Butler's saints have been eliminated by modern scholarship, shortage of facts or plain obscurity (there is no all-inclusive calendar of Catholic saints). Notable among the additions is St. John Cassian. 5th century patriarch of monasticism, whose work was rated by St. Benedict as, after the Bible, the most suitable reading for Benedictine monks. Butler banned him. presumably for his leanings toward semi-Pelagianism (heretical insistence on man's perfectibility without God's help), but Attwater prefers to call him "anti-Augustinian." Other newcomers are those canonized since Butler's day--among them Joan of Arc, Terese of Lisieux, Pope St. Pius X, Mother Cabrini (first U.S. citizen to be canonized), Father Isaac Jogues and seven other French Jesuit missionaries martyred by Indians in Canada and New York in the 16405.

The saints in the new Butler are arranged by their feast days--three months to a volume--and the juxtapositions overlap time, place and personality.

Gallantry of Course. Saints have traveled a gruesome gamut of agonizing deaths. Blessed Margaret Clitherow, a jolly, capable British housewife who had hid many an underground cleric in her secret "priests' chamber," chose not to plead innocent or guilty at her trial in 1586 so as not to involve her children or Anglican husband--though she knew the penalty for such a stand was being pressed to death. "She was about a quarter of an hour in dying," flat on the ground with a sharp stone under her back and a door on her body with "weights placed upon it to quantity of seven or eight hundred weights." Gallantry seems to be almost a matter of course for martyrs. Blessed Richard Herst, an English farmer, was hanged for murder in 1628 when an officer arresting him (for refusing to attend Church of England services) fell down, broke his leg and died of gangrene. "He spent some time in prayer at the foot of the scaffold and then, seeing that the hangman was fumbling over fixing the rope, called up to him, 'Tom, I think I must come up and help thee!' "

But the ways the saints lived are even more astonishing than the ways they died. Margaret of Hungary was born a princess, but she chose to minister to the sick in ways that Attwater describes as "menial, repulsive, exhausting and insanitary." Her imitation of the lives of the poor was so squalidly real that at times her fellow nuns shrank from contact with her. She ate almost nothing, slept hardly at all and died in 1270 at 28. St. Benedict Labre was another dirty saint who spent most of his life tramping from shrine to shrine throughout 18th century Europe, sleeping in sheds or fields, eating meagerly of handouts and garbage, talking to virtually no one and smelling to high heaven. But when he died of a chill in Rome in 1783, "scarcely had he breathed his last when children in the street were heard to raise the cry, 'The saint is dead,' and the chorus was taken up all over the city." Exactly 100 years later he was canonized.

The life of 13th century Blessed Raymund Lull, who made it his life work to convert the Moors, was a failure in almost everything he undertook, but his vision was so bright and his energy so great that he never seemed to notice the defeats and frustrations that would have submerged an ordinary man. Fifth century Daniel the Stylite lived atop a pillar near the Bos-phorus for 33 years, and, like his famed preceptor Simeon, controlled with his prestige the emperors and patriarchs in the world below.

The Seven Sleepers. Editor Attwater has happily spared the shears on some of the best stories in Christian tradition, though modern scholarship and/or common sense deny them corroboration. One such is the legend of St. Marina, whom her father disguised as a boy and took to the monastery with him when he became a monk. In due course Marina, too, became a monk, and was accused of getting a local innkeeper's daughter with child. Dismissed from the monastery to live as a beggar at its gates, Marina uttered not a word in self-defense. Only when she died was her sex and innocence discovered. The lying innkeeper's daughter went out of her mind but was cured when she prayed for Marina's heavenly intercession.

The legend of 4th century St. Malchus is readymade for Hollywood--complete with caravans and capture by infidels, a fake marriage and a lovelorn heroine who became a hermit herself for love of the saint. The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, sealed up to suffocate in a cave by a persecuting emperor, were placed in miraculous hibernation by the Lord, to emerge 208 years later to their own astonishment and the edification of all good Christians.

"Writing or revising the lives of the saints is not the dull job most people think it is," said Editor Attwater last week. "It's astonishing what interesting material turns up."

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