Beatification is something conferred on those who have either led a blameless life, often in the teeth of extreme antagonism, while maintaining the teachings of Christianity and, more often than not, working tirelessly and without reward to further its spread and influence. There may be the odd miracle here and there (and more than a few martyrdoms) but a leisurely flick through any dictionary of saints reveals no end of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
And that’s not a bad basis for singling out those who go a bit further than others. There are doubtless a number of suspect cases in the full list; it’s hard to see unquestioned inclusion for the incredibly wealthy spending some of their cash on projects that ultimately will reflect well on themselves.
But there’s an undeniable similarity between the honours given out to people dedicating themselves to helping the community and the inevitable knighthoods conferred on those whose rewards have already arrived in the shape of high-level appointments and fat cat salaries. How we choose to honour ourselves as individuals in a society has never been a transparent meritocracy.
Within the Christian tradition most churches are dedicated in some way to the memory of a saint although I know of none venerating the names of today’s featured folk. Perhaps it’s a bit like pubs with twenty Red Lions or White Horses to every Case is Altered. There’s room enough for all and today’s recipients of our collective remembrance are indicative of the process as a whole.
Joachim and Anne were the parents of Mary. Their entire involvement in the stories of the scriptures is, to all intents and purposes, nil. We know nothing at all about them except for the fact they existed (not the most strenuous piece of inductive reasoning ever offered) and their names. Except that we don’t really know their names; these are names which have been ascribed to them many years after their far better-known grandson died on the cross.
Attempts have been made to confer on them some sort of benign holiness, but this smacks of ‘they must have been good because good came of them’ - a kind of heirloom worthiness that doesn’t suit our modern psychology at all. More recently the remembrance of these distant figures has become a reason to celebrate the role of grandparents and an excuse to be sold cards and flowers in order to so do.
Bartolomea Capitanio was, by contrast to the undocumented grandparents, a very real figure with a very real life. Born in the early years of the nineteenth century she grew up among many siblings under the control of an alcoholic father. As a child she was sent away to a convent school and tried unsuccessfully to make a life for herself as a nun. Bartolomea channelled her energies into coaching girls to live lives free of sin.
Having qualified as a teacher and, in partnership with Vincenza (the saint she is habitually paired with) she founded the Sisters of Charity to further religious teaching, support the vulnerable in the community and care for the sick. A life packed full of challenges an achievements made even more remarkable by the fact that she ignored any suggestion of letting up on the workload and died of tuberculosis at the age of 26.
So honours given to one case of a person putting the welfare and wellbeing of others above herself to the eventual cost of her life, and one case of just being the right sort of people by birth. Perhaps the mixture of approval and scorn with which the Queen’s twice-yearly honours handout is greeted is not a new thing at all.
