Saint, Holy
I often meet and talk with people from different religious backgrounds. I found astonishingly large number of situations where various misconceptions about holiness and "being saint" were proclaimed. The misconceptions are various, but they would almost always be linked to "humility" and a sense of worthlessness in humbleness. People simply cannot be free from the "Roman Catholic" misconception that holiness is a human characteristic or quality of the human moral. Let me correct the last sentence. According to Catholic teaching, holiness is not merely a human quality or moral trait, but primarily an essential attribute of God in which human beings share. Human moral perfection can only be called “holiness” in a secondary and derivative sense. Human holiness is indeed, in a moral sense, a quality of a person, but only as the fruit of God’s grace: “moral perfection, integrity of thought and action.” This view is the official one. In...