This month we lead with a review of a biography of Sr Clare Crockett which was published in 2022. God raises up saints in every generation, and they are often people of special relevance to their own time, and perhaps most especially to their own communities. Sr Clare did not come from a pious background; she wasn’t part of a Catholic group in her native Derry as a girl—far from it. She was wild. Yet precisely because of this, she is a source of hope for young people. Many can look at her life, her family background, her personal experiences, and say: “She is just like me!” This stands in marked contrast to reading the lives of many holy people from previous generations.
They say that the past is a foreign country, and in a sense a saint from the distant past has something of the foreigner about them. But someone who lived just up the road from you—someone who could easily have sat beside you in the classroom, or smoked a cigarette with you in some hidden corner of the school grounds—feels altogether different. And then there may come a day when you see an image of that same person, with a great halo around their head, displayed on a vast banner hanging from the façade of St Peter’s Basilica during their canonisation ceremony.
The life of someone like Clare Crockett shows just how powerful God’s grace is. In his review, Eamon Fitzpatrick highlights a key moment in her conversion: “She was not practising her faith at the time and did not see any reason for going to Mass. However, during the retreat, on Good Friday, she kissed the Cross as the others were doing. This simple act had a profound effect on her, as Clare herself explained: ‘I experienced the certainty that the Lord was on the Cross for me…. I had to do something for Him who had given His life for me.’”
One suspects that in the coming decades there will be a veritable flood of such saints. Already we have the remarkably ordinary and relatable young Italian, Carlo Acutis, raised to the altars. Others are surely following behind him: the likes of Alexia González-Barros, Marco Gallo, Pedro Ballester, Chiara Badano, and, of course, our own Clare Crockett. Their wonderful lives both console and challenge the rest of us for they show us that without a doubt sanctity is within the reach of us all.