Monsignor Sánchez de Toca urges restoring unity between theology and holiness, warning of a growing divide in the Church’s pursuit of truth and faith.
Newsroom (01/10/2025, Gaudium Press ) Speaking at the School of Theology of Northern Spain in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Monsignor Melchor Sánchez de Toca, relator for the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, reflected on the enduring relevance of the saints, emphasizing their role as both witnesses to the Gospel and as living challenges to Christian consciences.
“The lives of the canonized saints raise incisive questions that pierce our conscience,” Sánchez de Toca said on Sept. 26 at the academic event opening the new school year. “Our hope lies in the beauty of a life lived to the fullest and its power to attract. The saints appear before us with the radiance of a life that attracts and invites.”
In his inaugural lecture, he described the saints as “the Church’s true apologetics,” more convincing than abstract ideas or doctrinal formulas. “They are the credibility of the Gospel, incarnated not in ideas but in people of flesh and blood, because they reflect Christ,” he noted.
Sánchez de Toca acknowledged the wide variety of paths to holiness: “There are lives of servants of God that are truly heroic, more admirable than imitable; others lived in the solitude of the cloister or in the intimacy of a Christian home; and others simply luminous in their beauty. Theology cannot do without any of them.”
The tension between holiness and theology
Reflecting on his role since his 2023 appointment at the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints after two decades in the Dicastery for Culture and Education, Sánchez de Toca pointed to what he sees as a growing divide between holiness and theology.
“Knowledge and holiness have gone hand in hand in the lives of the great pastors and theologians of the great centuries,” he said. “But after St. Anselm, St. Thomas, and St. Bonaventure, it is difficult to find great saints among the teachers of theology.”
While the 20th century produced outstanding Catholic theologians recognized as intellectual giants, Sánchez de Toca noted that “none of them has deserved the glory of the altars.” Instead, he suggested, the knowledge of God most characteristic of sainthood “grows in the street, in the factories, in poor neighborhoods, in family life, or in the society of a monastery—but rarely in theology classrooms.”
According to the prelate, this has led to an uneasy separation: theology in academia, he said, too often disregards the lived wisdom of the saints, even as holy lives seem to emerge more directly from ordinary experiences of faith than scholarly environments.
Restoring unity to the faith
Sánchez de Toca argued for a renewed synthesis that would bring theology back into dialogue with lived holiness. “There already exists in this life a certain imperfect participation in the divine light, either through the understanding of faith, the scientia fidei, or through intimate and personal union with God, the scientia amoris,” he said.
“It is necessary to reconcile these two theologies,” he urged. “We need to restore the lost unity of theology, so that it may truly nourish the faith and not just the intellect, but rather be an introduction to the mysteries of God.”
- Raju Hasmukh with files from CNA
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