3 Saints Who Redefined Virtue
Wednesday, March 4, 2025. This is for Dr Elizabeth Petroff who, in 1972, taught me to study the lives of saints and to read tarot cards.
History has a wicked sense of humor when it comes to saints.
The halo usually comes out only after the heretic’s pyre has gone cold.
In their lifetimes, many of the Church’s greatest saints were treated less like holy heroes and more like misfits, rabble-rousers, or outright threats to the status quo.
The very people who redefined virtue often did so by thumbing their noses at convention – and for that, they paid the price, at least at first.
It’s as if the Church and society couldn’t recognize a saint until after giving them a good hard shove out of this world.
Now lets meet 3 of history’s holy iconoclasts – the saints who redefined virtue on their own terms.
Expect no syrupy hagiography here.
I admire these figures, yes, but always with a raised eyebrow.
Their lives remind us that real virtue often rattles cages before it earns a halo.
Over time, the Church and society came around to celebrating the very qualities that once made these people pariahs.
In doing so, they turned rebels into role models, proving that sometimes sainthood is just history’s way of saying “oops, we didn’t quite feel ya.”
The stories that follow will shine a light on how our ideals of goodness evolve – and how yesterday’s eccentric, principled troublemaker can become tomorrow’s saint.
I. SAINT FRANCIS: THE MADMAN OF ASSISI (13TH CENTURY)
He stripped naked in the town square, gave his father’s silks back to the world, and walked into history with the solemnity of a lunatic who had discovered something deeper than sanity.
Francis of Assisi—patron saint of peace, poverty, and well-meaning vegans—was a walking contradiction, embodying the unsettling possibility that virtue might not be about restraint but about reckless, unhinged surrender.
In an age of cathedrals rising like greedy fingers clawing at heaven, Francis went the other way. He kissed lepers. He talked to birds. He rolled in the dirt to battle temptation.
The Church found him both fascinating and terrifying. How do you market a man who says, "Sell everything and follow Christ" when the Church itself owns half of freaking Europe?
The answer: canonize him, turn his tattered robe into a relic, and slowly domesticate his wildfire into a cozy, Franciscan fireplace where you could warm your hands without getting burned.
But virtue, to Francis, was in the burning.
To be virtuous wasn’t about moderation—it was about extremism, a full-bodied hurling of oneself into the arms of God. Today, we admire his gentleness, his love of nature, his "brotherhood with the poor," but the Francis of reality was more radical than any modern climate activist or poverty abolitionist.
He was an inconvenient saint, and the world—then and now—has always found ways to make inconvenient men into ornamental statues.
II. SAINT TERESA OF ÁVILA: THE MYSTIC WHO TALKED BACK (16TH CENTURY)
If Francis rejected wealth, Teresa of Ávila rejected complacency. She lived in a world where women—especially women in religious life—were expected to be silent, obedient, and devoutly useful. Teresa was none of these things.
She was a mystic, a writer, a reformer, and a woman who refused to be sidelined. She heard voices, had visions, and claimed to feel the love of God so intensely it was almost erotic. Naturally, this made the Church nervous.
She spent much of her life founding convents and teaching that real virtue wasn’t in following rules blindly, but in an intimate, personal relationship with God. She was relentless, fiery, and wrote about divine union with a passion that made some censors wonder if she was speaking metaphorically—or just a little too honestly.
Virtue, in Teresa’s time, was about submission. But Teresa’s virtue was about courage—the courage to question authority, to demand reform, to live a life of ecstatic, mystical love in a Church that had little room for female ecstasy.
She was investigated for her writings. The Inquisition circled her like wolves. But she survived, not by submission, but by brilliance. Her virtue was inconvenient, her holiness was disruptive, and her intellect was too sharp to be dulled.
III. SAINT OSCAR ROMERO: THE MARTYR OF MODERNITY (20TH CENTURY)
Fast-forward to El Salvador, 1980.
The Vatican’s version of virtue had long settled into something manageable.
A saint, by this point, was someone who prayed a lot, helped the poor (but not too radically), and certainly didn’t upset the social order.
Then came Archbishop Oscar Romero, who read the Gospel and made the mistake of taking it seriously.
He started out as a safe choice for the clergy—a bookish, quiet man. But when he saw bodies in the street, priests being gunned down for siding with the poor, he realized there was no such thing as neutrality in a world where virtue itself had been militarized.
He stood at the pulpit and told the government soldiers—the ones who carried out assassinations in the name of "order"—to disobey unjust orders. "In the name of God," he told them, "stop the repression."
One day later, they shot him in the heart while he was saying Mass.
Virtue, by then, was a sanitized word.
It had been reduced to a set of personal moral regulations, a private affair between you and your conscience.
But Romero made virtue public again. He called out injustice from the pulpit, turned the altar into a frontline, and bled into his vestments for it. The Vatican dragged its feet on canonizing him, afraid of the political implications. Because if Romero was a saint, then the comfortable, moderate clergy who stayed silent weren’t just cowards—they were complicit.
EPILOGUE: VIRTUE, INCONVENIENTLY
Francis, Teresa, Romero. Three saints, three versions of virtue, three ways to become dangerous enough to be killed for it.
The Church made them saints, but only after stripping them of their sharp edges.
We remember them now in ways that are convenient. Francis, the kindly monk. Teresa, the wise teacher. Romero, the human rights activist. But in life, they were firebrands. Troublemakers. Threats.
And maybe that’s the point. Maybe real virtue isn’t just about goodness—it’s about defying what the world calls reasonable.
Maybe the saints aren’t just holy, but holy troublemakers. And maybe, if history is any guide, the best way to recognize a saint in the making is to ask: Who is making the powerful nervous today?
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.