Over and over again during the course of the liturgical year we celebrate memorials and feasts and solemnities of the holy men and women we call saints. Did you ever wonder why the church encourages us to venerate the saints?

The rationale behind this attention we pay to them is not just one of remembrance, so that we will not forget these great men and women of the past. Nor is it exclusively a matter of improving our own relationship with the Lord by imitating those who were and are dear to Him. As much as anything else, the veneration we are invited to offer to the saints is a matter of thanksgiving.

When we celebrate the liturgical memory of one of God’s saints, we are being invited to be grateful for that saint, to offer God thanks for the gifts that have come to us through the life and work of that holy person. In its liturgical calendar, the church says to us over and over again, "It’s the feast of St. ______, and he or she calls for thanksgiving!" The life and work of every saint has brought blessing to the church and blessing to the church’s members and calls for gratitude.

The pope has encouraged local observances in schools and parishes and dioceses. Here in our local church of Cincinnati, our Worship Office will be distributing materials to help prepare for these observances. We are also planning to have a vesper service at the Cathedral of St. Peter in Chains on Jan. 25, 2009 to mark the conversion of St. Paul and another one at St. Paul church in Englewood on June 28, 2009 to close this once-in-a-lifetime Year of St. Paul.

As we move into this yearlong observance, it seems to me that it’s important to maintain our awareness that all of this is not just about remembering somebody that was born a long time ago. It’s also about being conscious of the gifts that person brought to the church, gifts that we still enjoy today. This special year is about being grateful. The pope is inviting the whole church for a whole year to say, "Thank God for St. Paul."

One reason to thank God for St. Paul is that we know him so well. There are few persons in the first centuries of our era who are more familiar to us, who are presented to us in greater detail than St. Paul. We know where he was from. We know what kind of an education he had. We know about his fundamental religious persuasions. We know how he spoke and how he wrote. We know something about his prayer life. We know quite a bit about his personal history, what engaged his religious attentions as he lived his life. We know who his friends were. We know where he traveled in the course of fulfilling his calling from God. We know what kind of a person he was: intense, outspoken, fiercely dedicated to the Lord.

It’s almost as if he is somebody that we grew up with, a friend of longstanding. It’s a gift to share that much of anybody’s life. Knowing somebody like St. Paul is a gift of particular magnitude. It calls for our thanks.

There are other reasons to be grateful to God for St. Paul. One is the vastness and depth of his writings. St. Paul wrote all sorts of things, from the deep theological insights of the Letter to the Romans to the friendly pleadings of the Letter to Philemon. And St. Paul wrote a lot! No New Testament writer is represented in greater quantity than St. Paul. No fewer than 87 chapters are from his hand or the hands of disciples working under his direction. (The next most prolific New Testament writer is St. Luke, with 52 chapters.)

Without doubt the New Testament is one of the greatest gifts that God has given us, and therefore the writers who worked under God’s direction to produce it were offering a unique service to the people of God. Thank God for St. Paul.

Thank God, also, not just for the quantity of what St. Paul wrote but for its theological content as well. Some of the church’s most fundamental teachings (things like salvation and eschatology and the relationship between Christianity and Judaism) are proclaimed earliest and best in the writings of St. Paul.

There is still one more reason why I find it easy to be grateful to God for St. Paul, and that is because St. Paul is an apostle of gratitude. Over and over again we see him giving thanks to God for those to whom he is writing: "I give thanks to my God through Jesus Christ for all of you." He gives thanks for the gifts they have received: "Thanks to the Father who has made you fit to share in the inheritance of the holy ones in light." He exhorts his readers to give thanks to the Lord. He wants them to be grateful: "Persevere in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving."

St. Paul was a grateful believer and he wanted his followers — then and now — to be grateful believers, too. Thank God for St. Paul.