Catherine of Siena, Undset says, “If a man loves God, he will be able to love his neighbor, attain wisdom, and to be just and truthful. For Sigrid, the saints were loci of Revelation and living Beatitudes, capable of communicating the love of God with great persuasion, and so making a culture more and more Christian. Indeed, she understood her own Norse culture to have been transformed-converted-by the saints. So I had to submit.” In this experience of God’s friends, Undset considered herself just one of the many who were so affected by the saints. Undset had converted to Catholicism (from Atheism) in 1924, and when asked about her conversion, she replied, “I had ventured too near the abode of truth in my research about ‘God’s friends,’ as the saints are called in Old Norse texts. Undset won the Nobel Prize in 1928 for her trilogy, Kristin Lavransdatter. Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) was herself an artist and a convert. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger once reported that “the only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” In this month marked by the feast of All Saints, I wish to take up examples of the truth of Ratzinger’s statement, one from the literary arts and one from the visual arts, both related to the saints.
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