We need saints to dispel the miasma of evil. Alvaro del Portillo was one of them.

A ray of light through the clouds

by Michael Cook

I’m finding it hard to watch the news lately, dominated as it is by the atrocities of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Hostages beheaded on YouTube, reports of Christians and other minority groups slaughtered, women sold into brothels, centuries-old communities obliterated.

“Barbaric” fails to describe the malevolence of these fanatics; a better word may be “demonic”.

Evil hogs the headlines; goodness flies under the radar. But as President Obama told the United Nations General Assembly earlier this week, the ultimate victors over groups like this evil “network of death” will be the decency, dignity and courage of ordinary people in their everyday lives. Our civilisation rests on the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil.

That’s why one reason why everyone has a stake in the existence of saints, people whose goodness has burned white hot: they are the last best hope for mankind. If the world produces ISIS, Pol Pot, the Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust and the Gulag, but it cannot produce saints we ought to give up.

Which is a round-about way of explaining why I am a bit disappointed not to be attending the Beatification of Bishop Alvaro del Portillo in Madrid tomorrow. I gather that hundreds of thousands of people, from all over the world, will be there to celebrate his elevation to the ranks of the “Blessed”.

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