The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1905-09-30
PROTESTANT ADMIRATION FOR SAINTS.

Nobody who makes any pretense of being abreast
of the times can have failed to notice the changed
attitude of Protestants towards principles, prac-
tees devotions, etc.. once held to be "Romish" and
hence abomnable. In no way is this more clearly
and strikingly manifested than in the growth of
Protestant admiration for some of the saints In
deed one would suppose that poor st. Francis of
Assist were a true blue Protestant from, the way
our separated brethren have adopted him into their
gallery of heroes ST. Catherine of Seine is another
of our saints who has fallen into Protestant hands,
as it were Miss Vida D. Scudder has just written
a book about the saint, ''St Catherine of Sena as
seen in Her Letters" and from this book the Pro
testant and secular press has discovered how much
sanity and spiritual excellence there was in the
character of Catholic mystic. The Churchman
protestant Episcopalian) says, in reviewing Miss
Scudders book:
Until the saint of Assist won his way to our
hearts and minds there was in the modern world
certain antipathy at least lack of sympathy for
the medieval saints Even now, to a vast majority
of Protestants st. Francis is the exception proving
the rule but his popularity has already done much
TO mitigate prejudice against those of his spiritual
type and to stimulate curiosity at least concerning
it. Ten years ago men could see in St. Catherine
of Selma little more than an ignorant ecstatic man
ifesting religious excitement in grotesque and pain
full fashion Today students of history and psychol
ogy are recognizing that the important characters
tics of this remarkable woman are not her hysercal
eccentricities but the spiritual sanity of her mind
the common sense and penetration she exhibited in
dealing with human nature whether in individuals
or affairs of state
We have no desire to deprive our Protestant
friends of the luxury of admiring ST. Catherine OF
Siena. They cannot very well study her life with
out profting thereby. But we would respectfully
ask them not to try to make Protestant of her.
Above all things they should refrain from calling
her "a forerunner of Luther" Anything but that
Some nine or ten years ago the London Daily
Chronicle (of course not Catholic paper) deliv-
cred some opinions concerning St Teresa which it
would be we'll for Protestant admirers of Catholic
saints to read. est. Teresa" said this London pa
per- was winning and wise, self denying humorous
and discreet in one simple phrase she used all her
powers in doing, and making others do, the right
and righteous thing. Whether ruling a convent. or
writing upon the mystical life, or dealing with dig
ntaries of the church and state she kept the golden
mean never straying into tyranny or heresy or re-
bellion Her interior life and her public life show
an equal aspiration after justice, the will of God
the precise and definite truth. To all the refomers
she is an example; all who in church and state take
the side of absolute right amid a world of indif-
ference and misunderstanding and artagonism
may copy her She flung no fanatical defiance i'll
the face of the world She struck out no new way
of her own she did not part company with the past
She neither clamored like Carlyle nor walled like
Rousseau nor Numbered like Savonaroa; but what
she believed to be right, for that she worked sparng
not soul nor mind nor body, with self abandonment
to the law and light of God."ASacred Heart Re
view.