Quotes from Joan Barthel

Her grandson Robert Seton bears out her stark intention, 'She occasionally had her fits of melancholy and one in particular, when about eighteen she so far forgot herself at a time of unusual despondency as to entertain the wicked purpose of self-destruction.

I was laughing with God,' Elizabeth said in her Italian journal. In the years since, she had come to know the peace that comes from finding God everywhere, in everything, in everyone. As Gandhi would one day put it, 'If you don't find God in next person you meet, it's a waste of time to look further.

Notes pinned to babies left on church doorsteps by mothers who couldn't take care of them are preserved in the archives of the Society of Charity of New York, at the Foundling Hospital.

But it's possible to be wry and somewhat skeptical about the tedious, expensive process of saint-making without losing sight of the person at the center. Without saints, sanctity might be considered only as an abstraction. Saints help us see how a spiritual life can be lived in many different ways and under many different social and historical circumstances.