It was a few years ago now. During the Liborius Days, I was standing by the Paderborn Cathedral tower with our navi4life trail. An elderly woman approached me: “I really don’t like the new statue of Saint Liborius down in the cathedral crypt at all.” When I asked her why, she explained that he was looking over people’s shoulders and not looking at them. I then said to her, “We don’t need such strange saints who won’t even look at us, but do you know how you recognise a saint?” Her reply: “Yes, by the ‘saintly glow’.” But I wasn’t talking about the wooden statues in our churches, but about the real saints here on earth. So I asked: “No, I mean the saints of today!” – “I’ve no idea,” the lady told me. “Well, by their broken, dented noses!” I let her know with a smile. “I don’t understand that.” – “I’d be happy to explain it to you. Unfortunately, we’ve elevated the saints to the honour of the altars, as we say. That puts them far away from us, and we get the impression that they all have spotless moral records. And so we think, ‘We’ll never manage that.’ But if you look more closely, many saints weren’t without sin. Rather, they had a very deep trust in God’s love and mercy. That’s why, whenever they fell flat on their faces, they always got back up straight away – trusting in God’s mercy. “And this trust reaches and touches God’s heart!” The woman looked at me with a smile, touched her nose and said to me: “I suppose that means I’m a bit of a saint myself.”
