In times of secularism and relativism, it is often insisted that holiness is undergoing a profound crisis or that it is simply impossible for people today. It is presented as a relic of bygone eras, an unattainable ideal reserved for extraordinary minorities, or a form of alienation incompatible with autonomy and self-interest.
This factor involves secularism that tends to confine the religious to the private sphere, while relativism dilutes the very possibility of an objective truth about the good and the meaning of life. In that horizon, dominant social models exalt individual self-realization understood as the maximization of immediate desires, the accumulation of fleeting experiences, and success measured in terms of visibility, consumption, or power.
The concentration of selfishness generates weary, anxious, and fragmented societies. Rapid and fleeting consumption, promoted by an economy of attention and disposability, promises immediate satisfaction and fulfillment; instead, what it truly generates is recurring emptiness. The crises of these models in the family, in work, institutional trust, and even in mental health, are symptoms of an anthropology that denies the deepest vocation of the human being.
These models not only exhaust people, they also seek to discredit holiness because it tends toward insufficiency. By presenting it as outdated or impossible, they avoid confronting the true measure of human existence, which is not exhausted in fleeting pleasure or the isolated self. Instead of offering a horizon of fulfillment, they propose cycles of novelty and discard that leave the thirst for meaning untouched.
Holiness, far from being an obstacle to fulfillment, is the most radical response to that need. In the face of this panorama, the teaching of Benedict XVI, expressed in his general audience of April 13, 2011, offers a luminous and demanding counterpoint at the same time. The Pope Emeritus recalled that holiness is not the privilege of a few chosen ones, but the very measure of Christian life and the universal vocation of all the baptized.
It does not consist in carrying out extraordinary enterprises, but in uniting oneself to Christ, in living his mysteries, and in making his attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors one’s own. Holiness is measured by the stature that Christ attains in us, by the degree to which, with the strength of the Holy Spirit, we model our entire existence according to his.
The secret, therefore, does not lie primarily in human effort or in the accumulation of merits. It is God who makes us holy. It is the action of the Holy Spirit that animates us from within; it is the very life of the risen Christ that is communicated to us and transforms us.
It may seem ethereal and difficult, but this transformation has its roots in the grace of baptism that inserts us into the Paschal Mystery. Holiness is, in the end, charity fully lived. Benedict XVI simplified with pastoral realism what is essential: not to let a Sunday pass without encountering the Risen One in the Eucharist, light for the whole week; not to begin or end a day without at least a brief contact with God, and to follow, in concrete decisions, the “signs” that God has communicated to us in the Decalogue read “in the key” of Christ, which are nothing other than forms of charity.
This simplicity and greatness dismantle the prejudice that holiness is outdated or impossible. Precisely because it does not demand spectacular gestures, but rather the daily openness to the action of the Spirit, it becomes accessible to every person, in any state of life, and amid the most ordinary fragilities. The social models that portray it as unrealizable do so because they ultimately fear a measure that is not exhausted in selfishness or in what is fleeting.
That is the meaning in these days that open each November. To open oneself to the action of the Holy Spirit who transforms our life, to be part of the great mosaic of holiness that God is creating in history, so that the face of Christ may shine in the fullness of its splendor.
As Pope Benedict XVI rightly stated, let us not be afraid to reach upward, toward the heights of God; let us not be afraid that God may ask too much of us; let us allow ourselves to be guided in all our daily actions by his Word. Even if we feel poor, inadequate, or sinful, it will be he who transforms us according to his love. What is in crisis is not holiness, but the supposed models of human fulfillment that contemporary society proposes—those that reduce each human being to the realm of the objectifiable and disposable.