Lucifer (12:10), who condemns us before God as worthy of eternal damnation — this Satan who whispers our sins into our ears to tempt us to despair. Michael drives out the demons of this accuser who tempt us to doubt God’s love for us, to doubt our own goodness, and to doubt the evidence of our religious experience and of all created things that testify to God’s power. Alcoholics and addicts, policemen and murderers alike, have called on St. Michael for help in times of struggle. I have called on him myself in prison ministry, working from 2014 to 2017 in the Catholic chaplaincy at San Quentin state prison in California, where inmates experience a powerful sense of demonic evil.
My third name, Joseph, is my “confirmation name,” a custom from some parts of Europe that has found a home throughout much of the United States. The idea is simple: You pick a saint you like and make his name part of your own when you receive the sacrament of confirmation. It’s pretty cool to pick a name for yourself, and often the bishop or priest even uses this name, rather than your birth name, when confirming you.
During my junior year (2001–2002) at all-male Wabash College in Indiana, I chose St. Joseph for my confirmation name after having some trouble deciding whom to pick. Not having grown up Catholic, I wasn’t sure how to discern what saint inspired me the most. When I asked our local pastor for advice, he just shrugged and said: “When I was a kid, every Catholic boy picked Joseph.” For him, the husband of Mary covered all bases, as St. Joseph is the patron saint of everything from husbands and workers to priests and the universal Church.
When I reflected on St. Joseph in prayer after my confirmation, I found myself admiring his trust in the infancy narrative of Matthew’s Gospel, where he takes Mary into his home and follows God silently despite his initial uncertainty. Since I figured I might have a family of my own one day, Joseph seemed like a good patron saint for me, as he was the patron of fathers too. For a year or two, I prayed to him with a little chaplet (corded rope with medal) and prayer that a friend gave me as a confirmation gift. I was also happy that Joseph was the patron saint of workers, as I certainly hoped to find a job after college!
Five years after my confirmation, when God called me to the priesthood instead of marriage, I had the chance to pick another saint’s name for my first perpetual vows in the Society of Jesus. Unlike some monastic religious orders where men and women replace their first name with a saint’s name, like “Rebecca” becoming “Sister Mary Robert,” I was not required to replace “Sean” with another name like “Aloysius” (Thank God!). But I followed the Jesuit option of choosing a devotional vow name, picking “Ignatius” in honor of our religious founder.
Jesuit Vows
During my two years of Jesuit novitiate from 2005 to 2007, I grew to admire St. Ignatius of Loyola for the depth of his relationship with God and for the life story in his autobiography, which moved me to tears and struck a deep chord in my heart. Like St. Ignatius, I felt God’s grace had led my life in a different direction than I originally planned, guiding me each step of the way to a deeper trust in the divine will.
On August 15, 2007, the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I ended my two-year Jesuit novitiate by professing my first perpetual vows in the house chapel at St. Charles College in Grand Coteau, Louisiana:
Almighty and eternal God,
I, Sean Michael Joseph Ignatius Salai,
understand how unworthy I am in your divine sight.
Yet I am strengthened by your infinite compassion
and mercy,
and I am moved by the desire to serve you.
I vow to your divine majesty, before the most holy Virgin
Mary and the entire heavenly court, perpetual poverty,
chastity, and obedience in the Society of Jesus.
I promise that I will enter this same Society to spend
my life in it forever.
I understand all these things according to the
Constitutions of the Society of Jesus.
Therefore, by your boundless goodness and mercy
and through the blood of Jesus Christ,
I humbly ask that you judge this total commitment
of myself acceptable;
and, as you have freely given me the desire to make
this offering,
so also may you give me the abundant grace
to fulfill it.
St. Charles College, Grand Coteau, Louisiana,
August 15, 2007
Pope Francis, whose behavior as Holy Father continues to manifest the radical trust of a Jesuit’s lifelong commitment to God, took these same vows on March 12, 1960, and they sustained him up to his final profession of vows following ordination to the priesthood. They are the same first vows that every Jesuit has professed in various languages since the time of St. Ignatius, whose name now forms part of my own.
All of the saints in my name are part of my life’s story. I know them through their relics and writings, through biographies and films like Paolo Dy’s 2016 movie Ignatius of Loyola, and through my experiences of reflecting on the images of their lives in prayer. And if Pope Benedict XVI is right that the best arguments for Catholicism are its saints and the art it has produced, then the artwork depicting my “name saints” manifests God’s love to me in a unique way. In my room, as I write these words, hanging on the wall above my bed are the following icons: St. John the Evangelist, St. Michael the Archangel, St. Joseph, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and Our Lady of the Assumption. Each image has a distinctive iconography or set of artistic features identifying that saint, such as St. Joseph holding the baby Jesus or Mary rising from earth into heaven.
In addition to my icon of Mary, I have a large icon of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, an image dear to our religious order that bears his name. And I have a framed portrait of Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope who, like many others and me, got to know the great Jesuit saints as he underwent our infamously long training program (it took him eleven years; twelve years for me) in preparation for ordination to the priesthood.
When my life feels like a failure, when I struggle to find God, and when nobody is nearby to talk with me about it, I can always look at these icons and talk with these saints. Their images pull me out of myself and remind me that I am never alone.
Surrendering to God
To live my vocation as a Jesuit, in this day and age, requires a lot of trust. At age twenty-five, I left a career as a newspaper reporter behind, selling a house and giving away a car to enter the Society of Jesus. But in the course of my formation for the priesthood from 2005 to 2017, it helped that I was surrounded by peers who were all making the same commitment, aging and struggling together with me as we grew into our Jesuit lives and priestly vocations.
It also helped that I had my patron saints, both Jesuit and non-Jesuit, to help me grow closer to God in moments of struggle.
On his first All Saints’ Day as supreme pontiff, Pope Francis put his finger on what makes the saints so accessible in drawing us to God:
The
