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What is at stake in our failure to call the vast majority of the baptized to intentional discipleship? As I wrote in my chapter on sacramental grace and personal faith in Forming Intentional Disciples:
“In Leon Bloy’s novel The Woman Who Was Poor, the heroine famously declares, “There is only one sadness, it is to not be a saint.”[1] The tragedy of not being a saint is both global and personal, temporal and eternal. A saint’s life sends out ripples of grace that bless many within the Church and outside of it. When the fruit of a saint’s life is missing, all of us are impoverished, because the impact of the presence or absence of the power of the Holy Spirit doesn’t stop at the borders of an individual’s earthly life.
But I have to disagree with Bloy. I think that there is a greater sadness than even the lack of individual saints: the absence of the communal fruit that God intends to manifest within our Christian communities and networks of saints-in-the-making. This absence is an almost unfathomable loss because it affects the whole human race. We can be deprived of the rivers of prayer, generosity, wisdom, love, creativity, charisms, vocations, and grace that God intends to bless, heal, evangelize, and transform the lives of billions. . . "
"Many things lie in the balance, but certainly these four:
1) The eternal happiness in God - the salvation - of every human being.
2) The complete fruition of the Mass and the sacraments.
3) The next generation of Catholic leaders, saints, and apostles: priestly, religious, and secular.
4) The fulfillment of the Church's mission on earth."
[1] Leon Bloy, The Woman Who Was Poor (London:Sheed & Ward, 1947), p. 354.
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Intentional Disciples Blog 
