Fr. Aloysius Roche - Splendor of the Saints: How They Dazzle the World and Shape History

F ATHER Aloysius Roche, said one of his contemporaries, has the gift of making saints fascinating. In Splendor of the Saints, first published in London in 1936, he displays that gift in abundance, with a cheerful, even childlike charm. His view of the saints reflects a sense of wonder and delight that is at once refreshing and contagious.

Perhaps Fr. Roches winsome attitude toward our elder brothers and sisters in the Faith sprang from his own childhood experience. He had plenty of siblings to look up to: Born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1886 to a Welsh convert mother and an Irish Catholic father, he was one of sixteen children and the youngest of ten sons. Remarkably, four of the boys were to become priests.

The family owned a grocery store in town where young Aloysius worked for several years after high school. When at last he discerned a priestly vocation, he was accepted into the Redemptorist novitiate at Bishop Eton in Liverpool in 1904 and was professed in 1908. He completed his seminary training in 1914 at St. Marys Monastery in Kinnoul, Perth, Scotland, and was ordained that year by Bishop Robert Fraser.

Fr. Roche began his ministry in Liverpool, and from there he launched his first parish mission work. But by 1917, health problems led him to affiliate with the Diocese of Brentwood as a secular priest. After several months at Walthamstow, he was assigned to the town of Billericay in 1918. There he remained as parish priest for forty-eight years.

As director of the Brentwood Diocesan Catholic Evidence Guild, Fr. Roche became widely known as a Catholic apologist through his preaching and writing. He spoke frequently on the BBC Silver Lining program and later made television appearances as well. He was especially popular as a preacher in the London area.

Those sermons and lectures provided the substance for many of the twenty-eight books he published. Despite his busy schedule as a pastor and preacher, between 1932 and 1955 Fr. Roche averaged nearly one book a year, publishing three titles in 1938 alone.

Reflecting his childlike spirit, his first excursion into the field of literature, as he put it, was entitled Talks for Girls (1932). It was the fruit of numerous retreats he had preached for children. Other titles for children and youth followed, such as Talks for Young Women (1938); The Boyhood of a Priest (1938); A Night of Adventure; or, The Four Musketeers (1940); All Aboard the Centurion (1945); Animals Under the Rainbow (1950); and Christians Courageous: Tales of Christian Adventure (1955). Asked once about his favorites among the numerous books he had published, he admitted: My own partiality is for works addressed to young readers.

Meanwhile, Fr. Roches adult audiences had their favorites among his titles as wellcelebrated works such as A Bedside Book of Saints (1934), for which Splendor of the Saints (1936) was an equally popular companion work; Apologetics for the Pulpit (3 volumes, 19351936); The Things That Matter (1941); Knots and Crosses (1942); and Mystery Man, or The Catholic Priest Explained (1950). He once noted with characteristic humility: My best work is undoubtedly the one I hope to write someday.

Fr. Roche maintained his energetic ministry of pen and pulpit for more than half a century. He did not retire until 1966, at the age of eighty. He died two years later, still young at heart.

Countless books about the saints have been written. What distinctive angle of vision does this one present to make it worthy of a new edition for a new generation?

According to the authors preface, his earlier work, The Bedside Book of Saints, laid the stress upon those qualities which it is customary to speak of as human. One and all the saints were human, and it is always useful to remind ourselves of the fact. But that human aspect was only half their story, and it would not do to strike the human note in the saints too emphatically or to pause over it for too long. This might easily reconcile us to our own mediocrity.

For this reason, the present work soon followed that book to complete the picture. We all chafe against the monotony of the humdrum and commonplace, and we reach out to the exceptional and the heroic, Fr. Roche observed. It is this scaling of the heights, this ecstasy of soul, these elements of the exceptional and the heroic, that constitute Splendor of the Saints.

Even so, the author resists the temptation to which many writers have succumbed: He does not focus primarily on the miracles of the saints. His eye may be on the exceptional, but it is not on the sensational. Though he may examine here what he calls the dazzling aspects of their lives, it is not the glitter of preternatural fireworks. Rather, he marvels at the brilliance of valiant deeds and heroic dimensions, the extraordinary saintly features that serve to stir us, to hold our attention, to inspire us to follow them, and ultimately to sanctify us.

With each characteristic examined, Fr. Roche paints these saintly portraits against the background of secular celebrities from history. In this way, he shows by contrast not only how much more brightly the saints shine, but also how much more worthy they are of our attention and imitation.

Do our hearts thrill to read the romantic adventures of the past? The romance of the saints is more thrilling, and more honorable, still: The knights fought with robbers and tyrants and giants. The saints fought with the Devil, the world, and the flesh. Both knights and saints leave home and country: the first in search of adventure, the second in quest of penance and peace.