Three Ordinary Saints

This month, to mark All Saints’ Day — the feast the Church sets aside to celebrate the saints, known and unknown, officially recognised and uncanonised — three readers tell us of holy people in their lives.

These three “unknown saints” were ordinary people living ordinary lives, but they were also remarkable in the way they witnessed to their Christian faith. All of us have known such people — parents or grandparents, friends, fellow parishioners, priests or religious — and some of us will, we hope, also be remembered as models of holiness.

These three unknown, uncanonised saints may represent all those other unknown, uncanonised saints in our lives whose stories aren’t being told in these pages.

Jimmy McBride on his grandmother Rose Ferguson

My granny, Rose Ferguson was born in 1897 and went back to her heavenly Father in 1959. She had five sons and a daughter, my mother, who together gave her 30 grandchildren.

Granny ruled the family with a strong, loving hand. When my father was in hospital after a bad car accident and my mother had to work, Granny kept an eye on my four sisters and me.

She loved the Church and was always involved in the Catholic Women’s League (CWL) — and she was the person who showed me the faith and kept me in it. If Granny was not at the same Mass I went to, this was the interrogation that I had to endure: James, were you at Mass? What Mass did you go to? Who was the priest? (The good old days when many parishes had two priests.) What colour were his vestments? Who were the altar servers?

I spent many nights sleeping over at Granny’s. It seems that we were always at novena or Benediction or Mass. She even got me to join the boys’ choir — where I soon realised that God never meant me to sing his Word.

In primary school we had the opportunity to have the Nine First Fridays before classes started. Those who had been at Mass could go to the hall. We were allowed to bring a sandwich and the CWL women would make us tea. Granny was always aware of the poor kids in the parish. She would buy rolls and butter them, and very discreetly give them to the kids who had nothing. This was in the days when you fasted from midnight before going to Communion.

In Granny’s house was a statue of a young black man. Living in an all-white community in Scotland, he fascinated me. The statue was of Bl Martin de Porres, the Dominican Brother from Peru who would be canonised in 1962.

Granny had for many years taken in lodgers. They were mostly Irish, and her house was always alive with stories and song. She treated them as part of the family and would make sure they had good suits, collars and ties for going to Mass. One St Patrick’s Day they all had the day off from work and went to Mass. Granny was delighted — but on the way home, they ended up in a pub and gave it their best shot to drink it dry. However, the fighting — in a good old Scottish Catholic vs Protestant brawl – they did not win, ending up with all their lovely suits torn to shreds. Granny grounded the men.

Every Sunday at Granny’s was a repeat of the five loaves and two fish! How she fed everybody is a miracle.

My wife Anne, three-year-old son James and I emigrated to South Africa in 1972. Staying in the Hotel Louis in Pretoria, my first question was for the address of the nearest Catholic church. I was uncertainly directed to Sunnyside. On arriving at the church, we looked at its name: St Martin de Porres. I looked up to the sky and said: “Thanks, Granny!” We were home. I have been involved in the church to this day.

The greatest thing my granny taught me was to know God and know love. Thanks, Granny.

Theresa Fagan on her mother Phylis Honeywill

My mother, Phyllis Honeywill (pictured above), could easily be a candidate for sainthood. She raised eight children, two of whom are in religious congregations. When we were young, the first words that we heard in the mornings were, “Morning prayers everyone”, and every night as a family we recited the rosary and various novenas.

She always belonged to the choir in whatever parish she found herself — she had a great love of music and sang beautifully.

As we children grew older she joined the Catholic Women’s League, and at one point served as its president. She was part of a group of women at the cathedral of Christ the King in Johannesburg, helping to make and repair vestments for the priests. She was a devout member of the Third Order of St Dominic for many years.

She also founded Our Lady’s Guild of the Sick — these were ordinary people suffering with illnesses who offered up their suffering for priests.

Before her death at 89 in 1994, she was presented with the papal medal Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice.

She was a great example to all of us children, and was sadly missed after she died.

Deacon Walter Middleton on his mother Gertrude Middleton

My beloved mother, Beryl Gertrude Middleton, was born in India on July 3, 1922. She was an angel from heaven; her first name means “precious stone or jewel”. She was extremely warm, caring, kind and loving. She was the rock of the family, the glue that kept it together. I admired her firm belief in “The Three Cs”: Never complain, never criticise, and never condemn.

She had a heart of gold and was very compassionate towards the poor and hungry. Whenever beggars or other people came to her looking for food — and there were many — she made sure they’d never leave empty-handed, even though we did not have much for ourselves.

We were poor and my parents struggled to make ends meet. My dad, Thomas Walter Middleton, worked for the railways, and they didn’t pay much in those days. When I was born in 1948, my dad was earning just 250 rupees a month (equivalent to R135). It broke my heart when my mum shared with me that my dad once told her that we would have to manage with the pay he got — or eat dirt.

Mum used to patch and repatch Dad’s trousers. For most of her years, she worked herself to the bone in the kitchen, preparing delicious food for everyone. Feeding five growing children and a husband was no small task, but she did it with the utmost care, love and compassion. To say she was an excellent cook is an understatement. My friends used to flock to our house to taste the various delicacies she prepared, sometimes with limited resources.

Because we were poor, we could not afford chocolate Easter eggs, so Mum would make us Easter eggs out of chicken eggs. She had a talent for breaking the eggs right in the middle, emptying the yolks and whites into a frying pan, and then filling the empty shells with a couple of inexpensive sweets. She then put the shell back together, tied ribbons around the breaks, and painted the eggs. The mere sight of the beautifully decorated eggs would delight our hearts, and we’d open them up to see what sweets were inside. God bless her.

Mum was a giver. She was created in God’s perfect image and lived her life as a saint. She had a wonderful sense of humour and the memory of an elephant. Parkinson’s disease confined her to bed for

11 years, but she never ever complained, even when she developed bedsores. She had a million-dollar smile which captivated the hearts of one and all.

Mum was an Anglican for most of her life, but she always prayed the rosary with devotion as she loved Mother Mary, took us to church regularly, and taught us good values and principles. She converted to Catholicism at the age of 82.

Beloved Mum left for her heavenly home on January 20, 2009. It was an important day, when history was written; it was the day of the inauguration of Barack Obama, the first-ever African-American US president. For me, my mother was a true saint because she lived a saintly life. May her soul rest in peace. I love you, Mum!

This article was first published in the November 2021 issue of The Southern Cross magazine