From Publishers Weekly
The stories Catholics often hear about the saints can give the impression these people emerged from the womb with halos. Craughwell, a well-respected Catholic diocesan newspaper columnist, provides the rest of the story. His semi-irreverent collection assembles 29 sinners-cum-saints from Christian history in an enjoyable and riveting account of their lives and times. The table of contents reads like a most-wanted list: thieves, embezzlers, murderers, cardsharps, and even a warmonger. Some, such as the apostle Matthew, a former tax collector, will be familiar to readers. The brief biographies of the more obscure saints, however, are often the most fascinating to read. Craughwell introduces us to intriguing figures like St. Moses the Ethiopian, a violent gang leader who embraced a life of fasting and prayer after seeking shelter with monks in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century. St. Alipius, a student of another notorious sinner, St. Augustine, was "obsessed with blood sports." Craughwell does not dilute his belief that it is only through divine grace that these women and men were able to overcome their self-centeredness and redirect their lives for a greater purpose. His tone is occasionally patronizing, but the take-home point is vital: while we are all sinners, there is always hope. (Sept. 19)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Saints aren't born they're made; out of, as Craughwell's sketches of 28 of them demonstrate, oh-so-imperfect human beings, some well-known--St. Augustine, St. Patrick, St. Columba, St. Thomas Becket, St. Francis of Assisi--many others not. They include all manner of thieves (St. Dismas), bigamists (St. Fabiola), egotists (St. Ignatius of Loyola), and even the occasional Viking conqueror (St. Olaf). Craughwell provides biographical detail and, of greater interest, discussion of how particular saints have appealed to a collective sense of right and wrong and notice of how some saints have entered pop culture in modern guise (such as the St. Dismas-like hero of the movie The Hoodlum Priest). The saint among these 28 whose story is the most moving is probably the Venerable Matt Talbot (1856-1925), a chronic alcoholic from Dublin who quit drinking cold turkey to pursue a truly saintly, humble life thereafter. June Sawyers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Finally a book that reveals the saints as they truly were before grace intruded. Here are all your favorite intercessors with their venal, cranky, obnoxious, murderous tendencies intact. Destroying centuries of pious legends, Thomas Craughwell has written a darned inspiring book about real saints. If these folks can make the cut, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.”
—Raymond Arroyo, New York Times bestselling author of Mother Angelica and EWTNews Director
—Raymond Arroyo, New York Times bestselling author of Mother Angelica and EWTNews Director
Book Description
Saints are not born, they are made. And many, as Saints Behaving Badly reveals, were made of very rough materials indeed. The first book to lay bare the less than saintly behavior of thirty-two venerated holy men and women, it presents the scandalous, spicy, and sleazy detours they took on the road to sainthood.
In nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings about the lives of the saints, authors tended to go out of their way to sanitize their stories, often glossing over the more embarrassing cases with phrases such as, “he/she was once a great sinner.” In the early centuries of the Church and throughout the Middle Ages, however, writers took a more candid and spirited approach to portraying the saints. Exploring sources from a wide range of periods and places, Thomas Craughwell discovered a veritable rogues gallery of sinners-turned-saint. There’s St. Olga, who unleashed a bloodbath on her husband’s assassins; St. Mary of Egypt, who trolled the streets looking for new sexual conquests; and Thomas Becket, who despite his vast riches refused to give his cloak to a man freezing to death in the street.
Written with wit and respect (each profile ends with what inspired the saint to give up his or her wicked ways) and illustrated with amusing caricatures, Saints Behaving Badly will entertain, inform, and even inspire Catholic readers across America.
In nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings about the lives of the saints, authors tended to go out of their way to sanitize their stories, often glossing over the more embarrassing cases with phrases such as, “he/she was once a great sinner.” In the early centuries of the Church and throughout the Middle Ages, however, writers took a more candid and spirited approach to portraying the saints. Exploring sources from a wide range of periods and places, Thomas Craughwell discovered a veritable rogues gallery of sinners-turned-saint. There’s St. Olga, who unleashed a bloodbath on her husband’s assassins; St. Mary of Egypt, who trolled the streets looking for new sexual conquests; and Thomas Becket, who despite his vast riches refused to give his cloak to a man freezing to death in the street.
Written with wit and respect (each profile ends with what inspired the saint to give up his or her wicked ways) and illustrated with amusing caricatures, Saints Behaving Badly will entertain, inform, and even inspire Catholic readers across America.
About the Author
THOMAS J. CRAUGHWELL is the author of a dozen books, including Saints for Every Occasion, Do Blue Bedsheets Bring Babies?: The Truth Behind Old Wives Tales, and three volumes of urban legends. He writes a monthly column on patron saints for Catholic diocesan newspapers. Craughwell has written about saints for The Wall Street Journal, St. Anthony Messenger, and Catholic Digest, and has discussed them on CNN and EWTN. He lives in Bethel, Connecticut.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
St. Matthew, Extortionist
[1st century] FEAST DAY: September 21
No one likes taxes. But antitax animosity was especially intense in ancient Israel during the first century of the Christian era. In the gospels tax collectors (also known as publicans) are frequently mentioned in the same breath as harlots and sinners.
If tax collectors had a lousy reputation two thousand years ago, they deserved it. Under the Romans, the governor of each province was responsible for collecting the tax on land. Other taxes--on individuals, on personal property, on imports and exports--were subcontracted to private individuals who paid the Romans a fee in advance for the right to collect whatever Rome had levied on the conquered nations of its empire. These freelance tax collectors profited from this transaction by overcharging and extorting as much as they could get out of the taxpayers. The Romans didn't care--as long as they got the full balance of what was due. The Jews, on the other hand, cared quite a lot. In their eyes Jewish tax collectors were shameless crooks who committed the twofold crime of collaborating with heathens and preying upon their own people. Little wonder that the Jews of Christ's day regarded tax collectors with loathing.
Matthew, also called Levi in the gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke, was a tax collector at Capernaum, a Roman garrison town. He was sitting at his table in the customs house, shaking down his neighbors, when Jesus Christ walked by. Our Lord had just healed a paralyzed man; now he was about to reconcile a sinner. "Follow me," Christ said. To the surprise of the Roman guards, the clerks, and the taxpayers, Matthew got up, left the money where it lay on the table, turned his back on a life of government-sanctioned larceny, and joined the handful of men we know as the twelve apostles.
St. Luke's gospel tells us that Matthew celebrated his conversion by throwing an elaborate feast for Christ, the apostles, and a host of other guests. When the Pharisees complained that Jesus had no business dining with a notorious tax collector, Christ answered, "I came not to call the just, but sinners."
This is the only scene in the New Testament in which Matthew takes the spotlight.
From a very early date Christians attributed one of the gospels to St. Matthew. Although it comes first in the New Testament, in all probability St. Mark's is the oldest gospel, which almost certainly served as a source for Matthew. Matthew wrote for a Jewish audience; in his gospel he quotes frequently from the Hebrew scriptures to emphasize that Christ is the fulfillment of the prophecies. We owe to Matthew such unique features as St. Joseph's plan to divorce the Blessed Virgin Mary, the coming of the Magi to Bethlehem, King Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents, the Holy Family's flight into Egypt, a great part of the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the sower, the metaphor of the sheep and the goats at the Last Judgment, the suicide of Judas, and the guards at Christ's tomb.
There is no reliable record of what Matthew did after the first Pentecost, when the apostles scattered to preach the gospel. He may have gone to Ethiopia, or to the region near the Caspian Sea--those two destinations appear most often in the old sources. There is even a dubious claim that St. Matthew went to Ireland. The truth is St. Matthew's later life is a mystery. Tradition says that he died a martyr, cut down with a sword as he said Mass. But we aren't even sure about that.
St. Dismas, Thief
[Died c. 30] FEAST DAY: March 25
Christ was crucified between two thieves--all four gospels bear witness to this. But St. Luke's gospel fleshes out the scene a bit, giving "the Good Thief," the man tradition names Dismas, a few lines of dialogue.
The scene opens with the three men hanging on their crosses. "The Bad Thief," the man tradition names Gestas, reviles Jesus, saying, "If thou be the Christ, save thyself and us." That's when Dismas speaks up. "Neither dost thou fear God, seeing thou art under the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this man hath done no evil."
Then, addressing Christ, the dying Dismas says, "Lord, remember me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom."
Jesus replies, "Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise."
The scene is brief and poignant, and although the Good Thief doesn't say much, it is interesting to note that he has more lines than other, infinitely more popular New Testament saints. St. Jude, the enormously popular patron saint of impossible causes, is on record as speaking only once and very briefly in the gospels. Even stranger is the case of St. Joseph, Christ's foster father and the Blessed Virgin Mary's husband, who in the entire New Testament never says a single word.
From a very early date Christians found these silences and gaps in the stories of such significant players frustrating. An entire body of literature sprang up to answer the inevitable question "And then what happened?" The term for these narratives is apocrypha. They are writings that, in spite of their popularity with the early Christians, did not make it into the canon, the official list, of the books of the New Testament. Most of these works were omitted because they taught unorthodox doctrine (the so-called Gnostic gospels fall into this category). Other apocryphal works may have been perfectly orthodox in their understanding of the nature of Christ and his mission in the world but passed along stories about Mary's and Joseph's family backgrounds and the infancy and childhood of Christ that the early Church knew to be untrue or could not substantiate. The stories, or legends if you prefer, of St. Dismas are not theologically suspect, but it is certainly impossible at this point to say what, if anything, in these stories actually happened.
The earliest apocryphal work to attempt to flesh out the story of the Holy Family and St. Dismas is The Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of the Savior, dating from around 600. The book covers Mary and Joseph's journey into Egypt with the Christ Child to escape Judea's murderous King Herod, their return home to Nazareth a few years later, and Jesus' early childhood.
As Mary and Joseph wander through Egypt, looking for a safe place to call home, the local people warn them about a certain stretch of desert that is teeming with robbers. Hoping to pass without being detected, Mary and Joseph decide to travel by night. As they make their way through this dangerous territory, they see two highwaymen blocking the road ahead of them. Worse still, they realize that they have stumbled right into a robbers' camp: all around them dozens of cutthroats lie sleeping. The robbers watching the road are Dismas and Gestas.
Gestas is ready to get down to business and take anything of value the Holy Family has on them, but Dismas intervenes. "Let these persons go freely," Dismas says, "so that our comrades may not see them." It's a strange request from a hardened criminal, and Gestas dismisses it out of hand.
So Dismas makes his request more attractive. "Take to thyself these forty drachmas from me," Dismas says. Then he sweetens the deal by taking off his valuable belt and promising that to Gestas, too. The drachmas and the belt are an offer Gestas can't refuse, so he stands aside and lets the Holy Family go, free and unmolested.
Before they continue on their way, Mary prophesies to Dismas, "The Lord God will sustain thee by his right hand, and will grant thee remission of thy sins." But the Christ Child makes an even greater prophecy. "Thirty years hence, O my mother," he says, "these two robbers will be raised upon the cross along with me, Dismas on my right hand, and Gestas on my left: and after that day, Dismas shall go before me into paradise."
But this isn't the only ancient work to fill out the Dismas story. The Gospel of Nicodemus, a fourth-century apocryphal work, picks up Dismas's story where St. Luke's gospel leaves off. The Gospel of Nicodemus takes us down to the underworld during the three dark days Christ lay dead in his tomb.
According to Catholic theology, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God in Eden, the gates of Heaven were shut and would not be reopened until the Savior died and rose from the dead. During those long centuries the souls of the righteous went to Limbo, a level of Hell where they were spared the sufferings of the damned but were denied the beatific vision of God. When Christ descended into Hell, as the Apostles' Creed says, he liberated the souls of the just and led them to Heaven. In the Middle Ages this moment in the history of mankind's salvation was known as the Harrowing of Hell; it was a popular subject for mystery plays, with Christ entering like an all-powerful warlord ready to besiege a city. In spite of all the demons arrayed against him, Christ batters down the heavily fortified gates of Hell and releases the souls held captive there by the devil.
In The Gospel of Nicodemus, as the holy men and women who lived and died before the coming of Christ gather together for their long-awaited journey to Paradise, Enoch and Elijah see a man coming toward them dressed in vile clothes with the sign of the cross on his shoulders.
"Who art thou?" they ask, "for thine appearance is as of a robber; and wherefore is it that thou bearest a sign upon thy shoulders?"
The stranger is Dismas, of course, and he answers, "I was a robber, doing all manner of evil upon the earth. [But] I beheld the wonders in the creation which came to pass through the cross of Jesus when he was crucified, and I believed that he was the maker of all creatures and the almighty king, and I besought him, saying, 'Remember me, Lord, when thou comest into thy kingdom.' And forthwit...
[1st century] FEAST DAY: September 21
No one likes taxes. But antitax animosity was especially intense in ancient Israel during the first century of the Christian era. In the gospels tax collectors (also known as publicans) are frequently mentioned in the same breath as harlots and sinners.
If tax collectors had a lousy reputation two thousand years ago, they deserved it. Under the Romans, the governor of each province was responsible for collecting the tax on land. Other taxes--on individuals, on personal property, on imports and exports--were subcontracted to private individuals who paid the Romans a fee in advance for the right to collect whatever Rome had levied on the conquered nations of its empire. These freelance tax collectors profited from this transaction by overcharging and extorting as much as they could get out of the taxpayers. The Romans didn't care--as long as they got the full balance of what was due. The Jews, on the other hand, cared quite a lot. In their eyes Jewish tax collectors were shameless crooks who committed the twofold crime of collaborating with heathens and preying upon their own people. Little wonder that the Jews of Christ's day regarded tax collectors with loathing.
Matthew, also called Levi in the gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke, was a tax collector at Capernaum, a Roman garrison town. He was sitting at his table in the customs house, shaking down his neighbors, when Jesus Christ walked by. Our Lord had just healed a paralyzed man; now he was about to reconcile a sinner. "Follow me," Christ said. To the surprise of the Roman guards, the clerks, and the taxpayers, Matthew got up, left the money where it lay on the table, turned his back on a life of government-sanctioned larceny, and joined the handful of men we know as the twelve apostles.
St. Luke's gospel tells us that Matthew celebrated his conversion by throwing an elaborate feast for Christ, the apostles, and a host of other guests. When the Pharisees complained that Jesus had no business dining with a notorious tax collector, Christ answered, "I came not to call the just, but sinners."
This is the only scene in the New Testament in which Matthew takes the spotlight.
From a very early date Christians attributed one of the gospels to St. Matthew. Although it comes first in the New Testament, in all probability St. Mark's is the oldest gospel, which almost certainly served as a source for Matthew. Matthew wrote for a Jewish audience; in his gospel he quotes frequently from the Hebrew scriptures to emphasize that Christ is the fulfillment of the prophecies. We owe to Matthew such unique features as St. Joseph's plan to divorce the Blessed Virgin Mary, the coming of the Magi to Bethlehem, King Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents, the Holy Family's flight into Egypt, a great part of the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the sower, the metaphor of the sheep and the goats at the Last Judgment, the suicide of Judas, and the guards at Christ's tomb.
There is no reliable record of what Matthew did after the first Pentecost, when the apostles scattered to preach the gospel. He may have gone to Ethiopia, or to the region near the Caspian Sea--those two destinations appear most often in the old sources. There is even a dubious claim that St. Matthew went to Ireland. The truth is St. Matthew's later life is a mystery. Tradition says that he died a martyr, cut down with a sword as he said Mass. But we aren't even sure about that.
St. Dismas, Thief
[Died c. 30] FEAST DAY: March 25
Christ was crucified between two thieves--all four gospels bear witness to this. But St. Luke's gospel fleshes out the scene a bit, giving "the Good Thief," the man tradition names Dismas, a few lines of dialogue.
The scene opens with the three men hanging on their crosses. "The Bad Thief," the man tradition names Gestas, reviles Jesus, saying, "If thou be the Christ, save thyself and us." That's when Dismas speaks up. "Neither dost thou fear God, seeing thou art under the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this man hath done no evil."
Then, addressing Christ, the dying Dismas says, "Lord, remember me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom."
Jesus replies, "Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise."
The scene is brief and poignant, and although the Good Thief doesn't say much, it is interesting to note that he has more lines than other, infinitely more popular New Testament saints. St. Jude, the enormously popular patron saint of impossible causes, is on record as speaking only once and very briefly in the gospels. Even stranger is the case of St. Joseph, Christ's foster father and the Blessed Virgin Mary's husband, who in the entire New Testament never says a single word.
From a very early date Christians found these silences and gaps in the stories of such significant players frustrating. An entire body of literature sprang up to answer the inevitable question "And then what happened?" The term for these narratives is apocrypha. They are writings that, in spite of their popularity with the early Christians, did not make it into the canon, the official list, of the books of the New Testament. Most of these works were omitted because they taught unorthodox doctrine (the so-called Gnostic gospels fall into this category). Other apocryphal works may have been perfectly orthodox in their understanding of the nature of Christ and his mission in the world but passed along stories about Mary's and Joseph's family backgrounds and the infancy and childhood of Christ that the early Church knew to be untrue or could not substantiate. The stories, or legends if you prefer, of St. Dismas are not theologically suspect, but it is certainly impossible at this point to say what, if anything, in these stories actually happened.
The earliest apocryphal work to attempt to flesh out the story of the Holy Family and St. Dismas is The Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of the Savior, dating from around 600. The book covers Mary and Joseph's journey into Egypt with the Christ Child to escape Judea's murderous King Herod, their return home to Nazareth a few years later, and Jesus' early childhood.
As Mary and Joseph wander through Egypt, looking for a safe place to call home, the local people warn them about a certain stretch of desert that is teeming with robbers. Hoping to pass without being detected, Mary and Joseph decide to travel by night. As they make their way through this dangerous territory, they see two highwaymen blocking the road ahead of them. Worse still, they realize that they have stumbled right into a robbers' camp: all around them dozens of cutthroats lie sleeping. The robbers watching the road are Dismas and Gestas.
Gestas is ready to get down to business and take anything of value the Holy Family has on them, but Dismas intervenes. "Let these persons go freely," Dismas says, "so that our comrades may not see them." It's a strange request from a hardened criminal, and Gestas dismisses it out of hand.
So Dismas makes his request more attractive. "Take to thyself these forty drachmas from me," Dismas says. Then he sweetens the deal by taking off his valuable belt and promising that to Gestas, too. The drachmas and the belt are an offer Gestas can't refuse, so he stands aside and lets the Holy Family go, free and unmolested.
Before they continue on their way, Mary prophesies to Dismas, "The Lord God will sustain thee by his right hand, and will grant thee remission of thy sins." But the Christ Child makes an even greater prophecy. "Thirty years hence, O my mother," he says, "these two robbers will be raised upon the cross along with me, Dismas on my right hand, and Gestas on my left: and after that day, Dismas shall go before me into paradise."
But this isn't the only ancient work to fill out the Dismas story. The Gospel of Nicodemus, a fourth-century apocryphal work, picks up Dismas's story where St. Luke's gospel leaves off. The Gospel of Nicodemus takes us down to the underworld during the three dark days Christ lay dead in his tomb.
According to Catholic theology, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God in Eden, the gates of Heaven were shut and would not be reopened until the Savior died and rose from the dead. During those long centuries the souls of the righteous went to Limbo, a level of Hell where they were spared the sufferings of the damned but were denied the beatific vision of God. When Christ descended into Hell, as the Apostles' Creed says, he liberated the souls of the just and led them to Heaven. In the Middle Ages this moment in the history of mankind's salvation was known as the Harrowing of Hell; it was a popular subject for mystery plays, with Christ entering like an all-powerful warlord ready to besiege a city. In spite of all the demons arrayed against him, Christ batters down the heavily fortified gates of Hell and releases the souls held captive there by the devil.
In The Gospel of Nicodemus, as the holy men and women who lived and died before the coming of Christ gather together for their long-awaited journey to Paradise, Enoch and Elijah see a man coming toward them dressed in vile clothes with the sign of the cross on his shoulders.
"Who art thou?" they ask, "for thine appearance is as of a robber; and wherefore is it that thou bearest a sign upon thy shoulders?"
The stranger is Dismas, of course, and he answers, "I was a robber, doing all manner of evil upon the earth. [But] I beheld the wonders in the creation which came to pass through the cross of Jesus when he was crucified, and I believed that he was the maker of all creatures and the almighty king, and I besought him, saying, 'Remember me, Lord, when thou comest into thy kingdom.' And forthwit...
