A Crushing Weight
The Church is clear: holiness is not just important; it is the supreme calling of every human life. Jesus “preached holiness of life to each and every one of His disciples of every condition” (LG 39). St. John Paul II declared it the “fundamental vocation that the Father assigns to each of [us]” (CFL 16). Yet, for many, this universal call feels like an impossible task.
The concept of holiness has become vague, equated with a flawless moral perfection or spiritual purity that seems far beyond the reach of ordinary people wrestling with ordinary lives. If this supreme calling feels unattainable, how can we pursue it without anxiety and, ultimately despair?
This misunderstanding is not a minor theological error; it has devastating consequences for the spiritual life. Mistaking holiness for moral perfectionism leads to a host of spiritual trouble:
Discouragement & Despair
- Exclusion: Holiness is seen as something reserved for the “spiritual professionals” rather than every ordinary baptized Catholic.
- Impossible: I may agree with the universal call to holiness, but it seems unreachable in practice, at least for me. I aim to barely get into purgatory.
- Perfectionism: In moments of failure, I see holiness as an all-or-nothing pursuit. So when I fall I give up. “If I haven’t reached some standard, I’m in mortal sin, etc… why even try?”
- Exhaustion & Despair: I burn out because the effort just can’t be sustained. Or, repeated attempts make me realize I am unable to perfect myself. I give up because I feel I can’t.
Distorted Relationship with God & Self
- Fear: I seek to do what is good out of anxiety over failure rather than love.
- Pelagian Tendencies: We may not intellectually think we can save ourselves, but holiness as self improvement seems in our control. Holiness becomes something we earn, rather than a consecration given by God’s selection.
- Egotistical Trap: Spiritual effort is reduced to self-perfection projects. I become subtly self-absorbed in a world of planning, assessing, and improving myself.
- Unable to Rest: I am unable to enter God’s rest and find balance, because I feel obliged to exert effort at all times. I may seek to maintain rigid control, micromanaging thoughts, actions, and discipline to an exhausting degree.
- Unworthiness: I constantly feel unworthy and unloved by God, because I judge everything in relation to my ability to reach moral perfection.
Distorted Relationship with Others
- Judge Others: Everything becomes a comparison and I worry and feel less than others, or look down on them and feel I am better.
- Disillusionment: I cannot really understand the Church as full of sinners and am easily scandalized. I may even leave because of other’s sin.
This flawed view of holiness, the core project of our lives, sets us up for failure.
Biblical Holiness: Set Apart for God
To heal these spiritual wounds, we must return to the source. The problem begins with our language. The English word “holy” (from hālig, whole/healthy) subtly primes us to think of personal completeness and moral flawlessness. The biblical concept is radically different.
The primary Hebrew word, qādash, and its Greek counterpart, hágios, do not mean “morally perfect.” Their fundamental meaning is “to set apart, to consecrate.”
God’s Holiness as the Source: God’s holiness is His absolute “otherness.” He is unique, transcendent, and beyond all categories (Isaiah 40:25). This divine distinction is the source of all other holiness.
The Old Testament shows that holiness is about being reserved for God’s possession and purpose, not inherent moral quality.
- Holy Places & Objects: The ground at the burning bush is holy not because it is “good,” but because God is present (Ex 3:5). The Temple utensils, the Sabbath day, the priestly garments—all are called holy because they are removed from common use and reserved for God. Their holiness is functional, not ethical.
- A Holy People: Israel is called a “holy nation” (Ex 19:6), and priests are “holy to their God” (Lev 21:6). This designates their unique, chosen status and function. It is a “positional” holiness. This is the key: Israel remains God’s holy, consecrated people even amidst their persistent sin and moral failings. Their holiness comes from God’s irrevocable choice, not their own faithfulness.
The Church: Holy Sinners
This same principle applies to the New Israel, the Church. The Church is called “unfailingly holy” not because her members are sinless, but because “Christ… loved the Church as His Bride, giving Himself up for her so as to sanctify her” (LG 39).
The most stunning proof comes from St. Paul. He addresses the deeply flawed community in Corinth—a church plagued by divisions, lawsuits, and sexual immorality—as “saints” (hágioi, the “holy ones”) in his opening greeting (1 Cor 1:2). For Paul, their sinfulness, while needing urgent correction, did not revoke their fundamental identity as a people consecrated to God in Christ. Holiness with moral imperfection is not only possible; it is the assumed starting point of the Christian life.
Become Who You Are
This brings us to the crucial tension. If holiness is just consecration, why do the prophets and Jesus rail against ritual observance devoid of justice and mercy? The answer is not that consecration is insufficient, but that it demands a response.
You don’t become holy. You already are holy. We are God’s possession, but we need to live like it.
This is the liberating truth. Holiness is not a moral achievement; it is an identity given to us in Baptism. It is a gift, not a goal. We are holy because we have been set apart and belong entirely to Christ (1 Cor 6:11).
Therefore, we do not grow in holiness as if accumulating a substance. Rather, we grow into holiness. Sanctification is the lifelong process of actualizing the identity we have already received. Sanctification is living out our consecration.
Think of the acorn. An acorn is already fully an oak in its essence. It does not grow to acquire the identity of an oak; that identity is present from the beginning. Its life is a process of growing into the mature fulfillment of what it already is.
Holiness (Consecration) is our foundational identity. It is a relational reality: we belong to God. This is the gift.
Sanctification (Transformation) is the process of our life, thoughts, and actions coming into alignment with that identity. It is our response.
Moral transformation is not the definition of holiness, but its necessary consequence. Sanctification is the process by which a person grows in conformity to the holiness that is already theirs by grace. The call to be “perfect” (teleios) in Matthew 5:48 is a call to reach this completeness or maturity—to fully live out the purpose for which we were made and consecrated. A baptized Christian who refuses to live according to this call contradicts not just a moral law, but his true self.
A Free, Joyful Spiritual Life
Understanding holiness as consecration changes the Christian journey. It cures the spiritual sickness caused by perfectionism and liberates us for a life of joyful cooperation with God’s grace.
- From Despair to Hope: My identity as “holy” is secure in Christ’s choice, not my performance. Failure is not a revocation of my status, but a call to return to the truth of who I am.
- From Fear to Love: I am free from the exhausting project of self-perfection. My effort is not to earn God’s love, but to respond to the love that has already claimed and consecrated me.
- From Judgment to Mercy: I can see myself and others as “holy sinners”—beautiful in our consecration even amidst our struggles. I am no longer scandalized by sin in the Church, but see it as the place of daily conversion and mercy.
Lay Life: Secular, Yet Consecrated
This understanding radically re-frames the lay vocation. For too long, a “two-tiered” Christianity has persisted in practice: the “spiritual professionals” (clergy and religious) who live a life of total consecration, and the laity, whose “secular” life is seen as a compromise. Vatican II clearly broke down this false division in Lumen Gentium.
One of the most dangerous consequences of making holiness into moral perfection is not just forgetting that consecration is the core of holiness, but the core of our very identity. Without this awareness, Christianity is easily reduced to a collection of ideas. It becomes a belief system. It is not seen as something that practically changes the totality of our life. Faith becomes an accessory to lay life. Lay becomes defined as “of the world” instead of just “in the world.”
The truth is that the lay state is secular, yet consecrated. Through Baptism, every Christian’s life is set apart for God. The distinction is not in the degree of consecration, but in its mode of expression. The religious lives out this consecration by being functionally removed from the world; the layperson lives it out by being functionally in the world, in order to permeate and consecrate the world itself from within.
Our work, our family life, our politics, our leisure—all of it is the raw material of our sanctification. The “domestic church” is not a pious metaphor for saying prayers at home; it is the primary place where a family lives out its total consecration. OCIA should not be mere information transfer, but an apprenticeship in this new, consecrated way of being. This was the model of the early Church—a kind of “secular monasticism” where ordinary life was the vehicle for holiness.
The Joyful Vocation
Holiness is not a crushing burden of moral perfection. It is the liberating gift of our true identity in Christ. We are His. We have been set apart, chosen, and lavishly loved. The universal call to holiness is not a demand to become someone else. It is a joyful invitation to spend our entire lives becoming more fully, more freely, and more fruitfully who we already are.
