May 5, 2011 – Sirach 44

Many people criticize Catholics for their statues and pictures of saints and the big deal they make about them.  The feast days and memorials, people say, take away from the glory we are suppose to give to God alone.  But remembering the heroes of the past that shaped our faith and the Church that we have today is not only a Catholic thing, from looking at this chapter, it a completely Biblical thing.  This chapter is an introduction to the next 4 or 5 chapters in which the author recounts the heroes and founders of the faith and recognizes them for their great characteristics.  The entire book of Sirach is more or less a manual for living, and here are the models.  This is exactly what the Catholic Church does with its saints, holding them up high as models of how to live a Christian life.  This particularly comes into play because we have had the most recent acknowledgment of Blessed John Paul II.  He is not a distraction from God, but a model and an arrow pointing to God and how to live.