For readers following along at home, she’s also known as St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
Ignatius Press is a major worldwide Roman Catholic operation with close ties to the papacy, and having bought a few things from them over the years (…well, more than a few things I guess) I’m on their mailing list for life. (…from which I continue to buy a few things I guess. )
They’re one of the few places, maybe the only place, to get the whole library of Von Balthasar in English, and a few years ago they promoted him HARD. Even today, at least once a year they’ll have a catalog listing all his major works. (Not by itself, but he’ll have a whole page and a half devoted to him.)
Well, in the last couple of years I’ve noticed a strong trend toward marketing St. Therese and St. Faustina. That’s partly due, I’m sure, to St. Faustina’s Divine Mercy movement being promoted with increasing strength – all the Popes since JP2 have been members, and when a movie was recently made about JP1 who reigned only 33 days one of the selling points was that Faustina had predicted he would only reign about a month! But less obviously, he was a proponent of her mission, too.
And St. Faustina was an avowed follower of St. Therese’s “little way”.
So now there are all kinds of books and films about both those saints, from little children’s books, to devotionals, to biographies (and not just of them but their relatives!), to scholarly examinations.
They’re easier to market than ancient patristics, of course; and I admit this is somewhat offset by a recent push to market St. Augustine to popular audiences. Then again, what does this marketing focus on? Take a guess. (Hint: not his ideological connections to the hopelessness of Calvinism. )
Between this, and the late JP2’s attempts at reclaiming Origen from the millennia smear campaign against him, and the peacemaking going on between the RCC (with EOx help) and the Oriental Orthodox and the Church of the East, what would I expect to come soon if this was a generational project (perhaps kicked off by St. Faustina–and Jesus?!) to bring the RCC over to at least the EOx permissive attitude toward Christian universalism? Or even further?
1.) Go hard next on Gregory Nyssus. He’s practically the last saint regarded as a doctor of the church by both the RCC and the EOx, and not only by them but by Anglicanism and Lutheranism as well! And how impeccable is the orthodoxy of the Father of Orthodoxy? The answer to this is DUH!
2.) Work hard to promote Diodore of Tarsus (founder of the Antioch school, whose orthodoxy was never smeared), teacher of Theodore of Mospuestia, and work hard to reclaim Theodore from the smear campaigns. They and other ancient Syrian universalists would be especially good to promote in the current world political climate.
3.) Find an orthodox saint also beloved by the Oriental Orthodox. Maybe Dionysius the Blind, the greatest successor to the Alexandrian school after Origen, and blessed for the task by Athanasius himself.
4.) While you’re at it, promote Athanasius because dang why not! Again ALL trinitarian branches of the church claim to follow and honor him.
5.) Pick up Dr. Ramelli’s recent work and make it more popularly available.
6.) Even if Origen is too touchy (but continue rehabilitating him from the smear campaigns, and point out how all those other saints revered him), go for Clement of Alexandria his teacher. Take the opportunity to talk about his teachers, the founders of the Alexandrian school, since they’re far more obscure than he is.