According to Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, prefect of the Congregation for Saints, the official count of saints and blessed as of October 2, 2004, was 6,538. Pope John Paul II alone has proclaimed 483 saints and 1,345 blesseds, the most of any pontificate.

To those who object that Pope John Paul II proclaimed too many saints, he said, “It is the fault of the Holy Spirit.”

Pope John Paul II believed that holiness is not rare, that it is, in fact, a much more common phenomenon in the Church than we think.

Actually, it is the saints themselves who would be the last to want to be praised and held up for veneration. After all, they have spent their whole lives in search of the Holy One, and in attempts to lead others to him, and not to themselves.

But the Church canonizes saints, not to glorify them, but in order to acknowledge and praise the power of Christ’s grace in them.

And she knows that we need heroes and heroines.

Perhaps throughout history, some people were really changed by a theory of goodness—those who had the desire and leisure to read about it. But who can count the multitude whose lives were changed by the lives of saints?

For what inspires us most in our own spiritual journeys is not clever ideas or theories about holiness, but holy people to whom we can look for encouragement and example.

Such people are walking gospels. By their very lives, as well as by their words, they show us how to live the Gospel.

Pope John Paul II was very aware of the role of saints in what he called “The New Evangelization.”

As Archbishop Nowak, secretary of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, said in an address to people involved in causes:

“The pope evangelizes with the saints and the blesseds, that is, with the Christians who have lived the Faith and the Gospel in a heroic and radical way. The saints are the evangelical images…, models of the Christian life in the various conditions in which we must incarnate the Gospel.

“Their lives are lives of radical testimony to Christ. They are given to us of the New Evangelization and to the men and women of our age.”

And Msgr. Piero Coda, a professor at the Lateran University said,

“The saints are the fullness of humanity. They make attractive today the beauty of the Gospel and its transforming force in society.

“We need to get to know the saints, and to tell others about them.”

In our age, the power of the mass media is obvious. If I had a few hundred million dollars, I’d set up a movie company to produce great lives of the saints, and I would flood the world with images of such saints as St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Maximilian Kolbe.

Great lives, portrayed in powerful, artistically well-done media, would be, I think, a tremendous source of inspiration for the world.