My generation, Gen Z, has been graduating from college for about ten years now, and is typically told some variation of the same message at Commencement: go forth and change the world. But not everyone can change the world. And perhaps it’s worth considering that not everyone should. The charge to change the world presupposes something of a utilitarian calculus: try to maximize the greatest change for the greatest number of people. Many will invariably try and fail. Where are they left?
Right after graduating from college, I was leaving Mass at a Jesuit Basilica, and I noticed a small flyer pinned near the exit. Beneath a photograph of then Blessed Carlo Acutis were the words: “You too can become a saint.” The contrast was arresting. “You can become a saint” is radically different from “you too can solve the world’s problems.” The former is universal and attainable; the latter, though not inherently wrong, is neither the purpose of life nor achievable for most of us.
The saints have, indeed, changed the world, but primarily as a consequence of their devotion to Christ. They lived through their faith in the transcendentals of beauty, goodness, and truth, which is a Person. The Christian call is not to change the world, but to strive towards sainthood – and to let God change the world through you. As the Second Vatican Council’s Lumen gentium (the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church) declared, sainthood is not solely for the clergy or for the hardworking few: “All men are called to this union with Christ, who is the light of the world, from whom we go forth, through whom we live, and toward whom our whole life strains.”
Saint Irenaeus reminds us that the Glory of God is a man fully alive. Striving towards sainthood is the essence of living life fully. Doing this in the modern world, though, inherently means going upstream against a river that is not just agnostic about sainthood, but generally opposed to the radical centeredness on God required for the saintly way.
Dedicating your life wholly to anything is not the way of today’s world. The classical world better understood and, perhaps, also empowered the genuine striving of the obsessive, unrelenting soul. But God’s call for us, even today, was never meant as anything but that. The saints are united in their passion for following the will of God. It was from this that their world-changing actions flowed.
Despite modern hostility to the Church’s teachings, the message of sainthood is finding new life in odd places, particularly among younger generations. Spain, for instance, has recently displayed some of the most fruitful examples of public figures receiving the call to holiness – seriously and openly. Last year, for example, Pablo Garna, a Spanish model and social media influencer, announced his decision to enter seminary, as did TikTok influencer Juan Manasa. Álvaro Ferraro, a businessman who founded four companies by the age of 30, left his professional life behind to pursue the priesthood. “My only dream and desire,” he said, “is to be a saint.”
Public figures like these, and our “millennial” saint Carlo Acutis, are precisely the examples needed to ignite redeeming countercultural aspirations in an age of distraction and of mediocrity on demand.
These cultural influencers are compelling for the radical upheaval they cause in their worldly lives, but also because they are quite obviously normal. They are not quiet monks, distantly praying daily on some mountain. As Bishop Robert Barron often says, “A saint is a person who knows they are a sinner.” So, we need to help people understand that saints, like heroes, are not models of perfection, but instances of normal human striving toward holiness.
Another message that resonates with my generation is that saints are people who believed wholeheartedly that their sins were not beyond redemption. The knowledge that one is deeply loved by God, redeemed by Christ, and made for Heaven is medicine for the world’s empty promises. I have met many young people who believe they are truly unworthy of mercy. And so, it is up to ordinary Catholics both to teach and to embody the reality of Christ’s mercy, making it clear that no sin is powerful enough to make repentance and the pursuit of sainthood unattainable.
Indeed, the saints remind us that some of the most beautiful stories begin and end in the ruins of life: in prisons, hospitals, heartbreak, and war. It was in Auschwitz, after all, that St. Maximilian Kolbe offered his life for another prisoner; and it was through fleeing the Nazis that Dietrich von Hildebrand wrote some of his most prolific reflections on beauty and the church.
Christ writes a beautiful story for everyone. The saints are those who dare to live that story, and pour themselves out completely in love, free from the worry of trying to “take charge of your life” – for it is this gift that is the point of life.
The message my generation most needs to hear is not “Go out and change the world,” but something both humbler and more demanding: “Go out and become holy, and let God do the rest.”
