Those Who Knew Paul

Paul Murphy, A Lay Model for Our Times
By Stephen Ryan, MJ

The Catholic Church has called for laymen and women to be put forward as ‘models of holiness and new witnesses of heroic virtue’ in the document Cristi Fidelis Laici. She asks the ‘particular churches to be attentive’ in recognizing and promoting these men and women as models for the edification and emulation of the lay faithful. This need is evident when one takes a close look at all of the saints canonized in the past 25 years.

Though our recently deceased Holy Father, Pope John Paul II of beloved memory, canonized and beatified more people than his predecessors over the last 500 years, a breakdown of the actual groups canonized is very revealing. Of the total 482 people declared Saints by the Church, 402 were canonized because of their glorious deaths as martyrs. Of the remaining 80, 75 in fact, were either bishops, priests, religious, or founders and foundresses of religious orders or congregations. The remaining five were laymen and women, and of those, three were pre-1600’s, one was born in the 1800’s and the last, an Italian woman, died in childbirth in 1962. All died before the end of the Second Vatican Council. There is at least one possible conclusion one may draw from this, and that is that there is no one among all of the laity worthy of raising to the Altars of the Saints, or the laity do not have the time, the know-how and the resources to promote others among their secular ranks to the Altars of the Saints.

This is where the local dioceses can do tremendous good in promoting the spirituality of the lay faithful by promoting true models of lay holiness. In Cristifidelis Laici the Church is pleading for models of holiness among the laity, ‘who have given witness to holiness’ and who can be an example for others, so that “they (the Churches) might propose them to be beatified and canonized.” How can the laity follow a model of holiness in lay spirituality when they do not have one from this day and age? Paul M. Murphy is just such a model for our times.

Paul M. Murphy was a man who fulfilled in so many ways what the Church is asking for in a Catholic layman. The proof of this is found in the very life that Paul Murphy lived. He was a layman living and working in the world, who was truly apostolic and who lived out the directives of the Second Vatican Council in a profound way. His canonization would be most timely in offering the laity a model easily followed in their daily lives.

It is an essential point, not reflected in the vast majority of canonizations, that ordinariness does not exclude holiness, as His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI made clear while still a Cardinal:“Heroic virtue does not mean that the saint performs a type of ‘gymnastics’ of holiness, something that normal people do not dare to do. It means rather that in the life of a person God’s presence is revealed – something man could not do by himself and through himself. Or, in other words, to be a saint is nothing other than to speak with God as a friend speaks with a friend. This is holiness.” (Our emphasis)

Stephen knew Paul for some years when he was a boy in the Miles Jesu youth group in Phoenix, Arizona.

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