I decided to walk my talk this Christmastide by making it to one church service on each of the happy Twelve Days: mostly the noon Mass at my parish church or its neighbors, but a few times at other churches in easy distance I do not always get to visit. That is the pious backstory for my acquiring a half-dozen wall-sized ordo calendars for an informal study of how the various sanctoral lists of the Episcopal Church are functioning on the ground.
Some years ago, I discovered one of the easiest things about life in the domestic church: to ask children at breakfast what saint is on the calendar hanging in the kitchen today. It makes a simple task out of the morning before school that reminds me what day it is, but gives them a color-coded, vocabulary-boosting snippet of liturgical information to supplement their secular textbooks — and mirabile dictu they actually like it.
But this year, with more than a few options to choose from, the cheerful exploration became a confusion of red, white, green, and purple: the sample size of Episcopal churches in Philadelphia County alone yields not one, not two, but at least five sanctoral designations for any given day: the Roman Martyrology, Lesser Feasts and Fasts, A Great Cloud of Witnesses, the Book of Common Prayer, and Holy Women, Holy Men speak cacophonously from the wall, much as they do in the proliferation of official and independent websites, daily office apps, and diocesan usages available online.
Children enjoy tearing off a page on the first day of each month along with their declarations of Rabbit, rabbit; so the several ordo calendars will stay on the wall for the remainder of this year. But a lesson of mass confusion is being learned by each of us each day: there is not just a legitimate diversity of commemoration, but a profound disorder of what, whom, and when that is not the sequential decency and devotion and learning about holiness in history that I have been hoping to promote at home. Was there any thing by the wit of man so well devised that it had not been corrupted? If a man with four decades of Episcopal Church experience, an advanced degree in church history, some internet chops, and a shelf of calendars cannot determine for his children what saint is commemorated on any given Tuesday, we must ask a question: has the sanctoral calendar machine of the Episcopal Church become a hyperspecialized entity that exists for itself, or does it work within and for a worshiping body of Christians?
In come the Bollandists, the 385-year-old organization that has placed itself in the service of the universal church East and West to offer responsible critical scholarship about Christian saints and their commemoration. This Jesuit-originated society has placed the most advanced skills of linguistics, papyrology, paleography, academic biography, scholarly editing, and self-effacement in the service of exciting holiness over four centuries. Bollandists have endured persecution and excommunication by their church, they have survived revolution and war, and they have always worked on a shoestring. There have been only 70 Bollandists in the society’s entire history, using and creating a library in Belgium of over half a million volumes exclusively about sanctity. They receive no public or centralized funding from any church body. They have a PayPal account.
I set up a standing small donation to the Bollandists and began to tell my friends about them not because I have any illusion about how they might influence the ordo calendars on my kitchen wall in any direct or likely fashion, but because I have some meaningful confidence that the Bollandist hagiographic project is responsible, effective, and scholarly in a way that no democratic process of electing saints in standing committees of a national church convention ever can be.
The digital turn in scholarship and church life has had a slow but now noticeable effect on the Bollandists’ work of hagiography. About one quarter of the Bollandists’ library has now been catalogued online, but the organization’s work of collating indices of calendars, sifting miracle stories, and parsing grammar will always be hardly the stuff that generates headlines or passion. Since 2015 the Bollandists have had a Facebook profile, and some significant portion of their religious labor now appears to be answering emailed inquiries from around the world. There is a new openness as articulated in an America magazine article in 2019, with an awareness that responsible hagiography can be a corrective to “fake news” about the saints and their lives, as well as what they might mean for us.
The Bollandists work within several of the diverse models of how the Christian church has come to discern that any person had heroic holiness worthy of the attention of the faithful within a few doctrinal systems about what sanctity even is, none of which has ever been exclusive to itself: popular acclamation confirmed by regional councils or synods; papal universal canonization; Orthodox glorification with the writing of a service, the creation of an icon, the publishing of a life. They do offer some methodical antidote to the confusion in our kitchen each morning, which itself hearkens to a moment on the floor of General Convention 2018 when my phone began to light up with colleagues asking whether Cyprian of Carthage and Thomas Ken each now had two or three separate feast days, which was somehow momentarily true.
All pedagogies of Christian holiness are complex things from many angles, and it is likewise true that every family, home, parish, diocese, and local or provincial church is a complex thing with diverse needs and duties. It does not praise the Bollandists or condemn the calendar committee of the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music to say that they are doing categorically different activities. Polyglot hagiographic scholarship based on documents and verifiable history on one hand and intransigent liberal liturgical activism probably do not overlap except that the individuals doing both also happen to be baptized. My new-this-year monthly PayPal donation is a small gesture of hope that one does more good for more persons over more centuries in more ways than the other through many changes and chances, as in common Christian life we discern which one was a doctor and which was a priest, and which was slain by a fierce, wild beast.
