St. John Berchmanns

John Berchmanns is one of the three Jesuit scholastics — with Aloysius Gonzaga and Stanislaus Kostka — who came to represent in the tradition a specific and distinctive ideal of religious youth: the holiness of the novitiate, expressed not through extraordinary gifts or dramatic suffering but through the perfect fidelity with which the ordinary life of a religious house is lived. He was born in Diest in Brabant in 1599, entered the Jesuits at seventeen, died in Rome in 1621 at the age of twenty-two, and was canonized in 1888.

He was never ordained. He produced no written work of any consequence. He did not conduct any apostolate in the usual sense. He was a novice who lived the novitiate well. This is the entire factual biography, and it raises a direct question: what kind of holiness does this represent, and why did the Church formally recognize it?

His novice master's testimony, and the testimony of the community that lived with him, answer the question consistently: what distinguished Berchmanns was the absence of anything distinguished. He was cheerful in the performance of every task he was given; he was faithful to every small regulation of the Jesuit Constitutions without the tension that such fidelity sometimes produces in those who value the rule above the spirit it serves; he was devoted to the common prayer and the common life with a quality of attention that his companions found, after his death, had been extraordinary, though at the time it had seemed merely the ordinary life well lived. His maxim — common life, common rule, common prayer — became the phrase by which his ideal was summarized.

The authenticated miracles after his death, centred on the Belgian and American missions, gave the cause its canonical foundation. He is the Jesuit counterpart of Zita of Lucca: the saint who shows that the ordinary life, lived with extraordinary love, is what the calendar is largely about.