Pray for Us: 75 Saints Who Sinned, Suffered, and Struggled on Their Way to Holiness

Review

Pray for Us (Ave Maria Press, 2021) is a 288-page collection of profiles of seventy-five saints and blesseds whose paths to holiness ran through addiction, violence, despair, and remarkable moral failure. Written by itinerant Catholic missionary Meg Hunter-Kilmer, the book's central argument is deceptively simple: the saints were not born holy. They were broken people, often dramatically so, who surrendered to God's grace. The book won a first-place award in the backlist beauty category from the Catholic Media Association. Hunter-Kilmer's method is deliberately counter-cultural within the hagiographic genre. Rather than "stringing together bare facts and dates," as most saint collections do, she writes with what Brandon Vogt calls the quality of "fiery magma, lively and flowing with verve."¹ The profiles are short, punchy, and deliberately jarring — organized around the tension between a subject's failures and their eventual holiness. The book's unspoken thesis is that canonization is not a reward for a life well lived from the start, but evidence that no life is beyond transformation. The range of subjects is deliberately eclectic and global. Blessed Carlo Acutis was "an ordinary Italian teen who enjoyed video games and loved the Eucharist but refused to waste time on things that weren't pleasing to God."² Blessed Sara Salkahazi began as a chain-smoking socialist and wild-child from Hungarian high society before eventually hiding Jewish refugees during World War II. St. Mark Ji Tianxiang was a Chinese Christian who struggled with opium addiction his entire adult life and was denied the sacraments for decades — yet died a martyr during the Boxer Rebellion. Blessed Bartolo Longo had served as a satanic high priest before his conversion and subsequent founding of schools, orphanages, and Rosary confraternities. Each of these lives illustrates the same point: that the call to holiness is genuinely universal, not reserved for the naturally devout. Fr. Agustino Torres described the book as "the saint book for the rest of us who have failed more times than we care to admit,"³ and Gloria Purvis praised Hunter-Kilmer for revealing "the humorous and relatable aspects of holy Catholics from all over the globe."⁴ The book concludes with an extensive index organized by name, feast day, and patronage, giving it practical utility as a reference for spiritual direction, homily preparation, or personal devotion. Endnotes Brandon Vogt, endorsement of Pray for Us, Ave Maria Press product page, avemariapress.com/products/pray-for-us. Meg Hunter-Kilmer, Pray for Us: 75 Saints Who Sinned, Suffered, and Struggled on Their Way to Holiness (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2021), publisher's description. Fr. Agustino Torres, C.F.R., endorsement of Pray for Us, Ave Maria Press product page. Gloria Purvis, endorsement of Pray for Us, Ave Maria Press product page.

✓ Strengths

• ✓Presents intercessory prayer as a communal act, grounding the reader in the Church's understanding that prayer is never merely private but draws the person into the Body of Christ.
• ✓The saints featured model virtue not as abstract ideal but as biographical fact — their lives serve as concrete evidence that the theological virtues can be habituated through struggle and fidelity.
• ✓Anchors prayer in the mediation of Christ, consistent with the Thomistic understanding that all prayer reaches the Father through and in the Son, not through the saint's merit alone.
• ✓Invites the reader into docility — the integral part of prudence that opens a person to learning from those who have gone before, treating saintly example as a school of practical wisdom.
• ✓The format supports lectio-style engagement, meaning the book can serve formation in community settings — parish small groups, spiritual direction, or family prayer — not only private devotion.