Saints and Blesseds of the Order of Malta

An archive of lives and devotion

The most beautiful theories, the most admirable sermons, the highest principles are worthless if they cannot be made to work or cannot be applied to every-day life. To preach a perfection which, basically would be only a myth, an ideal so ethereal that no creature under the sun could attain it, even by torturing himself with the best of good will, would be a cruel game of deceitful irony, a dangerous folly accountable to human and divine laws.

Does the spirit of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem belong to that unattainable category? Can the Religion of the Knights Hospitallers be only a dream as noble as it is unworkable and romantic? History rises in protest against that doubt. It shows us a whole phalanx of holy men who attest for us by their entire e lives that what is impossible for men is made possible for them by God.

We must, therefore, enter into the secret garden of Malta. and smell its hidden flowers. Too well hidden! It would be desirable that the admirable figures of saints formed by the spirituality of the Order be better known. They would be the most conclusive and convincing of pleas against those w ho proclaim chivalry worn out, finished, obsolete, anachronistic. This institution which produced such high virtues and such sublime sacrifices can never in eternity lose its value, its need to exist, its present interest.