My wife blogged Cathleen Falsani’s recent post. Falsani has a great blog and is an excellent writer in her own right. She is the author of The God Factor. From her interview with Thomas Craughwell, author of Saints Behaving Badly:
In honor of All Saints Day next week, I intend to hoist a couple dozen stiff drinks, start a bar brawl, sucker-punch a co-worker, walk around the neighborhood nude and maybe rob a bank.
What?
That’s what some of the officially recognized, church-sanctioned saints did.
Sticklers for truthiness that I know my readers to be, in fairness, most of the saints did those things before their conversions. But I bet most of you didn’t know that there were whoremongers, boozehounds, swindlers, and card-carrying sociopaths among the heavenly hosts?
…
So Craughwell writes about St. Matthew (the apostle) who was an extortionist, and St. Fabiola, the bigamist. There’s St. Moses the Ethiopian gang-banger, St. Olga the mass murderer, St. Augustine the heretic playboy, and St. Mary of Egypt — a nymphomaniac who once seduced an entire ship of pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land and then after her conversion wandered naked in the desert as a hermit for 47 years.
Sounds like a book I want to read. St. Francis is one of my favorite and he too, if memory serves me correct, wandered naked after giving away his clothes to a poor man.
(Via The Unlikely Missionary.)
