Vatican expert: The lives of the saints raise incisive questions for our consciences

Monsignor Melchor Sánchez de Toca, relator of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. / Credit: Diocese of Vitoria

ACI Prensa Staff, Oct 1, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).

Speaking at the School of Theology of Northern Spain in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the relator for the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, Monsignor Melchor Sánchez de Toca, noted that the lives of the canonized saints “raise incisive questions that pierce our conscience.”

“Our hope lies in the beauty of a life lived to the fullest and its power to attract. The saints appear before us with the radiance of a life that attracts and invites,” he emphasized at an academic event on Sept. 26 marking the beginning of the school year.

During his inaugural lecture, Sánchez de Toca also stated that “the saints, along with Christian art, are the Church’s true apologetics. They are the credibility of the Gospel, incarnated not in ideas but in people of flesh and blood, because they reflect Christ.”

“There are lives of servants of God that are truly heroic, more admirable than imitable, imposing because of the radical nature of what they demand; there are lives hidden with Christ in God, in the solitude of the cloister, in the intimacy of a Christian home; and there are beautiful, truly luminous lives. Theology cannot do without any of them,” he added.

Divorce between holiness and theology

Appointed relator for the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints in March 2023 after 20 years working in the Dicastery for Culture and Education, Sánchez de Toca explained that while “knowledge and holiness have gone hand in hand in the lives of the great pastors and theologians of the great centuries,” there has increasingly been at work “an ever-widening divorce between holiness and theology.”

He noted that “after the great figures of St. Anselm, St. Thomas, and St. Bonaventure, it is difficult to find great saints among the teachers of theology.”

“The 20th century has been rich in great theological figures of the first order who can be counted among humanity’s greatest thinkers, but none of them has deserved the glory of the altars,” he explained.

Sánchez de Toca argued that “the knowledge of God proper to the saints develops far from the classrooms and corridors of theology schools: It grows in the street, in the factories, in poor neighborhoods, in family life, or in the society of a monastery, but rarely in theology classrooms.”

According to the relator, it seems “as if the knowledge of God proper to the saints is moving away from the university environment and at the same time, the knowledge of the faith taught in classrooms is disregarding the knowledge of the saints and any connection with them.”

Restoring the lost unity of theology

Sánchez de Toca also maintained that “there already exists in this life a certain imperfect participation in the divine light, either through the understanding of faith, the ‘scientia fidei’ (the knowledge of faith), or through intimate and personal union with God, the ‘scientia amoris’ (the knowledge of love).”

“It is necessary to reconcile these two theologies,” he emphasized, adding that “we need to restore the lost unity of theology, so that it may truly nourish the faith and not just the intellect, but rather be an introduction to the mysteries of God.”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.