How to Be Holy & Eleven Cardinals Speak on Marriage and the Family

How to Be Holy: First Steps in Becoming a Saint.  By Peter Kreeft, Ignatius Press, 2016.

 

Eleven Cardinals Speak on Marriage and the Family.  Edited by Winifried Aymans, Ignatius Press, 2015.

 

Every person of faith has to address several major questions.  Two important ones that are addressed in the books How to Be Holy and Eleven Cardinal Speak on Marriage and the Family are: What does it mean to be a “good” person, and why is it important to be “good?”  In How to Be Holy, Peter Kreeft discusses the various reasons why the average person ought to seek sanctity and discusses the reasons why people often fall short of this lofty goal.  Eleven Cardinals Speak on Marriage and the Family is a collection of short essays by prominent churchmen, explaining why the Catholic Church holds the positions that it does on relationships and hereditary bonds.  Both of these books are practical works, defining the reasons for behaving in what the Church considers to be a moral way, and then providing advice on how to live in that manner.

 

Peter Kreeft is the first to observe that there is a distinct degree of hubris in writing a book titled How to Be Holy.  In his very first lines, he rapidly confesses that he does not consider himself an exemplar of holiness, but the rest of the book is devoted to explaining how to move closer to achieving that nearly unobtainable goal.  In his introduction, Kreeft writes:

 

“The cover of this book is a joke.  You’re going to read How to Be Holy by whom?  Mother Teresa?  Saint John Paul II?  Saint Francis of Assisi?  No, by Peter Kreeft.  That’s like reading How to Be Honest by Pinocchio.

 

If you want to know how to be a sailor, do you read a book by a sailor or by a landlubber?  If you want to know how to be an astronaut, do you read a book by a successful astronaut or by a wannabe astronaut?  So if you want to read a book by a saint or by an absent-minded philosophy professor?

 

If you choose the second, I have a time share in Florida that I’d like to sell you.  

 

So why read this book?”

 

Indeed, why read this book?  It soon becomes clear that this is a self-help book, but it is a self-help book that asserts that success is impossible.  Though perfection may never be achievable, at least people can consistently improve themselves and their spiritual lives.  Some self-help books may help people improve their health, or follow their dreams, or make more money.  Yet none of these books produces a perfect success rate.  After all, many people read such books and do not improve their lives at all, and still others only lose a couple of pounds or make a few hundred dollars in their endeavors.  Still others follow the advice in certain self-help books and sadly wind up doing worse than before they started trying to make themselves better.  But while starting certain diets may actually result in weight gain, and certain get-rich-quick schemes may lead to financial losses, taking steps to purge sin from one’s life have a far smaller risk of backfiring and a much greater chance of leading to becoming a much better and virtuous person overall.

 

Kreeft makes it very clear that holiness is not easy to achieve.  He notes this, and then turns this point into a reason to study his work.  He writes:

 

“[M]y very failure to practice what I preach is what you need if you, like me, are a beginner.  In my own field, philosophy, I know that “experts” are often the last people to trust.  Brilliant philosophers are often quite insane.  Genius and insanity are often closely connected.  But the saints are not insane; in fact, they are the only truly sane people in the world because they are living in reality, in real reality, in ultimate reality, in God’s reality.  Despite what the Supreme Court says, it is the Supreme Being, not the Supreme Court, who invents and defines reality.

 

Even when the experts are not insane, they are sometimes not the best people for beginners to learn from at first.  This is true in almost any field.  Beginners in chess are usually better taught at first by other beginners than by grandmasters.  For when the teachers are beginners, the teachers and students are together; they experience the same failures.  This book is not a great chef serving up a gourmet dinner; it is one desperately poor bum telling another where there’s free food.”

 

While Kreeft is a trained professor of philosophy providing an informal, good-humored book of advice on how to live in a holy manner, Eleven Cardinals Speak is a collection of explanatory sermons from some of the highest-ranking members of the clergy in the world.  If the point of How to Be Holy is explain the reasons why people should strive to be saints, Eleven Cardinals Speak tries to persuade people to make saints of their spouses and family members as well.  The book opens with the contention that the family is currently under sustained attacks coming in many different guises, and that the best way to repel such challenges is to promote and adopt behavior consistent with Church teaching.

 

“[I]n order to lend greater weight to the contributions and also to create greater interest, cardinals of the Holy Roman Church were invited exclusively to write essays for the present book.  Most of them gained their experience in their important responsibility as diocesan bishops of prominent local Churches, some in other significant ecclesiastical duties.  All of them, however, became familiar with questions about marriage and family life through their priestly ministry.  The authors were asked, not to enter into further systematic discussions, but to write in the form of an essay their own reflections about their personal experience and perspective.  All the authors deserve our respect and thanks for the fact that they took the trouble to compose their essays within a short time, alongside their official duties.

 

The result stimulates reflections of an entirely different sort.  The practical conclusions are sometimes based on more fundamental reflections of a philosophical or theological nature; others presuppose this foundation and follow simply from practical experiences.  In keeping with the essay format of the contributions, it seemed appropriate for publication not to try to group the essays by topic for publication, but simply to arrange them in alphabetical order by the authors’ names.”

 

If there is one serious problem with this anthology, it is the fact that many of the points made by the cardinals become repetitious.  After all, all of these churchmen adhere to the doctrines of the Church, so they are essentially reiterating each other’s claims, assertions, and sometimes even arguments and metaphors.  This is not a bad thing– there is nothing wrong with all of these princes of the Church speaking as one.  But some of these essays cover the same ground as earlier works in the book, and the works may have the effect of preaching to the choir.  The authors do a fine job explaining and defending Church doctrine, but unfortunately the book would benefit from several new and innovative arguments to defend Catholic teachings on marriage and the family in order to provide a better contrast to the barrage of arguments people are exposed to that seek to undermine Church teachings.  

 

Overall, the essays argue for striving to improve the world rather than by withdrawing from it.  The introductory essay declares that:

 

“The Church must resist the pressure of the spirit of the world.  People who are in an irregular situation should, however, participate in the liturgy.  In an anti-religious world, we should stop trying to be “modern” and, instead, strive to contribute to the creation of an inspiring atmosphere, as many religious lay associations so marvelously do.  The valuable lay movements for pastoral ministry to the family that have developed in Latin America must be promoted, both for marriage preparation and for the accompaniment of married couples (family gatherings, anniversaries, and so on).”

 

These books both focus on the need for virtue, the positive effects that come from living virtuously, and the consequences of behaving in an immoral manner.  How to Be Holy focuses more on how virtuous behavior affects the individual, while Eleven Cardinal Speak centers around the family and the broader community.  Both books are worth reading for those who seek self-improvement and reasons for living one’s faith despite the inherent challenges and problems in doing so.

 

 

–Chris Chan