If there is to be real renewal of the Christian life, a culture steeped in the Blood of the Lamb, saints will be needed to seed it. Only the witness of sanctity can save us now.
Heroic men of God like Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr of the Early Church, shows us the way. No other writer of the Apostolic Age has expressed with such passion, such blazing intensity, the ardent thirst for God. "Let me be fodder for wild beasts," he told the Church in Rome, enjoining it from doing anything to thwart the march of his destiny, the longed-for rendezvous in the Colosseum, towards which he had been moving in chains all across Asia Minor. "That is how I can get to God," he told them.
In this powerful book about St. Ignatius of Antioch, Regis Martin shows us what a real saint looks like. His was no bourgeois faith, with its sniveling insistence on keeping the comfort zones undisturbed. His was not the mediocrity of those who are always at their best. But a hard gemlike flame set ablaze by Christ alone.
