As I finished up Vespers tonight for the Conversion of St. Paul and got my ribbons ready for tomorrow on my old-school Divine Office for the third-class feast of St. Polycarp, I realized something tonight: Whereas St. Paul probably prayed all 150 Psalms by memory in Hebrew every day or every week, and whereas St. Paul probably asked for intercession for the people he killed before his own conversion and perhaps even asked intercession for all those he names in his letter to the Hebrews (ch. 11-13) there is something St. Paul and St. Polycarp did not have: 2000 years of saints and martyrs in the Catholic calendar and roll-call of those catalogued in the highest roll call of the altar through canonization.
Many of us traditional Catholics feel very abandoned by the current governing powers of the Catholic Church and since inauguration day—the current governing powers of the US government (which, yes, I know, I know, we shouldn’t have put so much hope in a fair election or in “the plan” in a country that slaughters her own children as if in an urban death factory on conveyor belts.) At least Catholics being persecuted after the French Revolution could meditate on how much support they knew that had coming from the papacy, from the Vatican, from those holding to the Magisterium in Italy, from “Eternal Rome.”
But today, we traditional Catholics in America feel all alone. Well, it hit me that we are not alone. We have a larger corpus of saints to call on than St. Peter or St. Paul did. We all (even non-traditional Catholics) feel so isolated and alone in lockdown. As overly-pious and even as corny as it might read to certain readers, I propose we turn our loneliness to making friends in heaven. I propose we start thinking about the saints, doing litanies to ask for their intercession and begin—on a daily basis—to start talking to them as our best friends.
Yes, God has permitted or called us to carry a very unique cross in this time in Church history that probably has something to do with the third Secret of Fatima being the great and final apostasy of the Church from the hierarchy down. But God has also given us something that no other Catholics in Church history have been given: The largest list of saints up to this point in Church history. This isn’t just due to the fact we are the most recent Catholics alive on planet earth. As I have said on previous podcasts, there have been 70,000,000 martyrs for Christ in history but more than 45,500,000 of those 70,000,000 have died in the past 100 years. This means that we should also start praying to the martyrs whose blood is so freshly dried that it is a reminder that all saints are so willing to intercede for us on a minute-by-minute basis. We need not be so lonely if we remember the saints can be our best friends.
We may live in the darkest time in Church history, but never have we had more friends in heaven. I mean it quite literally that never once in history have Catholics had so many saints in heaven to call upon.