We live in a fallen world. As Christians and conservatives, we often emphasize the need for a more virtuous society, yet we can often struggle to find that same virtue within ourselves.
This age offers unprecedented access to and cultural acceptance of vice. Every day, we carry portals to hell in our pockets—devices that, with a single tap, can plunge us into sin. The gap between what we profess and how we live can feel crushingly discouraging.
When we hear stories of the saints, they often seem like spiritual superheroes, paragons of virtue from the start. Rarely do we hear about their struggles, their failures, or their slow, painful path to holiness. This silence can make sanctity feel impossible. But there are powerful, humbling stories that remind us God doesn’t demand perfection, only surrender. He meets us in our brokenness and, if we let Him, carries us toward our final home.
To demonstrate this point, I want to recount the stories of some saints whose lives were far from perfect, but God took what little they had and made it enough for His plan.
Most of Andrew Wouter’s life was the antithesis of Christian virtue. Born in 1542, Wouters felt called to the priesthood and was ordained at a young age. However, Wouters was a slave to his vices. Known for being a heavy drinker and fornicator, Wouters was consistently seen intoxicated and fathered multiple children out of wedlock. Due to his scandalous behavior, Fr. Wouters was removed from the priesthood and placed on suspension. After his suspension, he lived in Gorkum during the Eighty Years’ War.
In 1572, Wouters, along with 18 other Catholic priests, was captured by Calvinist rebels. The men were tortured for days. They could end their suffering by renouncing two major tenets of their Catholic faith: the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the authority of the Pope. Wouters was particularly belittled because of his sinful past. However, he and the rest of the men stood firm in their faith. At the age of thirty, Wouters and his cohort were martyred by hanging. His last words were, “Fornicator, I always was. Heretic, I never was.”
Now to the story of Mark Ji Tianxiang, a devout Christian and doctor in 19th-century China. After developing a crippling stomach ailment, Tianxiang prescribed himself a common drug at the time, opium. With this prescription, the doctor exchanged crippling pain for crippling addiction. He turned to the sacraments to break free from his vice.
Each week, he would return to the confessional, bringing his sins to God and receiving forgiveness, but his affliction persisted. At this time, addiction was not well understood, so it seemed to those around him that he had no desire to abstain from sin. Because of this, the priest to whom Tianxiang frequently confessed barred him from receiving the sacraments. For the next thirty years, he battled addiction. Yet Tianxiang remained steadfast and held on to hope that God’s grace would deliver him.
In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion swept through China. Thousands of Christians were captured and massacred, among them were Tianxiang and his family. Tianxiang pleaded with the rebels to kill him last so that none of his family would die alone. One by one, he watched as his wife, children, and grandchildren were martyred in front of him, until at last he was beheaded.
Mark Ji Tianxiang was declared a saint in 2000.
Lastly, I love the story of St. Peter on the shore with Christ after the Resurrection. For days, Peter felt immense guilt for having denied Christ. When he comes to Jesus in repentance on the shoreline, Jesus asks, “Do you love me?” three times. In the original Greek, there are two different words for love used in this conversation. The first two times, Jesus uses the word agape, which is a complete, self-sacrificial form of love.
Peter, knowing that he denied Jesus when it mattered most, responds by saying he loves Jesus, using the term phileo, which signifies brotherly love. The third time, Christ also uses the term phileo. He does this because He knows that Peter does not yet love Him perfectly, so He meets Peter where he is to draw him to where he is meant to be.
All of these saints were far from perfect. What each of them had in common was that they persistently repented and offered what they had. We are called to do the same.
Everyone will struggle with sin, and some will struggle more than others. There may be prolonged periods of your life where you are distant from God. Not everyone will become a model of heroic virtue in this life, just as not everyone finishes a race in first place.
But everyone is given the grace and the opportunity to finish the race, even if that means crawling across on your hands and knees. So in times of struggle, think of saints Fr. Andrew Wouter, Mark Ji Tianxiang, and Peter, and strive to finish the race.
