We are all called to holiness. It is easy to forget that, and easier still to think holiness belongs to other people, in other centuries.
The lives gathered here changed my mind. Servants of God, Venerables, Blessed and Saints: ordinary people who gave themselves to Christ so completely that they drew others to him. St Philip Neri did it with laughter, turning the streets of Rome into a school of holiness. Padre Pio did it in the confessional, hour upon hour. More inspiring still are the young saints and blessed of our own time: Carlo Acutis, who at fifteen did it with a laptop and a love of the Eucharist, and Blessed Chiara Badano, who met cancer with a smile at eighteen and taught us how to carry our cross: “For you, Jesus: if you want this, I want it too.” Each of them shows the same thing: holiness is within reach of all of us. We have only to trust our Lord Jesus Christ and the way he leads us.
I worship mostly with the 1962 Missal, and this dictionary is meant as a meeting place. The Tridentine rite and the Novus Ordo both belong to the one Catholic Church, and what is handed down is what forms the present. The saints make the point better than any argument could: the Church is truly universal, and she has gone on raising up holiness in every century, our own included.
They lived wholly for Jesus, through Mary, our Blessed Mother. As she does, the saints and the blessed pray for us before her Son, and we may ask the prayers of the venerable and the servants of God as well. This dictionary is here so that their lives can be known and followed, and their intercession asked before our Lord Jesus Christ.
By a Catholic layman