Segue to Sanctity, by Regis Martin

By Regis Martin, Crisis Magazine, Dec. 16, 2023

Regis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome.

If the Office of Unity, symbolized by a sitting bishop, is necessary to the maintenance of faith, then holiness of life is the reason for it.

[Editor’s Note: This is the tenth in a multi-part series on St. Ignatius of Antioch]

If the Office of Unity, symbolized by a sitting bishop, is necessary to the maintenance of faith—such has been the consuming preoccupation of St. Ignatius—holiness of life is the reason for it. And what is holiness? Nothing less than doing God’s will from moment to moment, to the very last breath; an oblation of self so totalizing as to leave nothing left save God and everything else in relation to God.

And the thing about holiness, of course, is that the moment “it appears on the scene,” as Hans Urs von Balthasar has noted in Razing the Bastions, “anxiety and wrangling fall silent.” How does St. Paul put it? “Have no anxiety about anything,” he advises the Philippians. Fear nothing but God, in other words, for He has overcome the world…..

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