What Makes a Saint? Saints Researcher Lisa Lickona

Lisa Lickona: Saints Researcher

This article was written by TMB contributor Amy White.

As research director for The Merry Beggars’ Saints series, Lisa Lickona holds a keen appreciation for the diversity of the saints she encounters.

“What you discover with saints is that they’re all utterly unique people,” she said. “They discover God in their lives, in the things that happen to them, and through their own personalities and their own experiences.”

So, the question becomes: With such an incredibly diverse set of saints, how do you truthfully tell the unique story of each one?

In her role as research director, Lickona’s job is to take this disparate bunch of holy men and women and ensure that their unique stories are communicated with accuracy and authenticity. She works alongside the writers to keep stories grounded in both the history of the time and the spirituality of the particular saint by offering feedback and direction to the writers during the story-crafting process.

Researching 'The Saints'

Joining The Merry Beggars in 2023, Lickona brought with her an impressive store of knowledge about an incredible range of saints—and a huge amount of experience finding trustworthy sources for her research on them.

The researcher first took a deep dive into canonized lives when she became the saints editor at Magnificat, where she served for eight years. In this role, she prepared several short essays each month on an impressive spread of saints—more than a thousand of them. Next, Lickona joined St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry in Rochester, New York, where she serves as assistant professor of theology and teaches classes about the saints—their lives, what we can learn from them, and how we can pray with them.

These many years of mulling over the saints now come in handy for the researcher, as she offers notes on the stories in The Saints series and explores the historicity and spirituality of each one. She has amassed several sources that she can consult when conducting her research for The Merry Beggars.

“My absolute favorite source for a saint is their writings themselves,” she shared. “A lot of saints have left us letters, memoirs; and that’s where you get the feel for ‘who is this person’ and ‘how did they really live?’”

These sources can offer a clearer picture of a saint’s individual thoughts, feelings, and personality, Lickona shared. The researcher also utilizes the writings of those who have been closest to the saints, as well as helpful sources from the leaders of the Church themselves, like Pope Benedict XVI.

“I love reading the homilies that Pope Benedict did on the saints. He actually did a lot of Wednesday audiences on the Doctors of the Church, the Fathers of the Church,” she said.

Lickona also looks to another source for aid—the saints, still moving in the life of the Church.

“There are a lot of saints that I feel close to and that I talk to,” Lickona shared. “I’m sometimes having a conversation in prayer with that person, asking them to help me understand what they want to share with the world, because the great thing about saints is they’re still active in the world.”

Refining the stories

With an extensive experience of saints research in her back pocket, and a bevy of sources at her fingertips, Lickona can offer solid guidance to The Merry Beggars team as it crafts the saints’ stories. She brings her expertise to the pitch, schema, and first draft meetings where discussions about how to tell the stories take place.

“I’m reading materials, usually in advance, maybe making some comments on them, and then coming to the meeting and sharing my take,” she explained, “and hopefully supporting the creative process by highlighting things that help the writer to make it a really full, rich story about the saint that’s historically grounded.”

Lickona described these meetings as “a real writers’ room,” a place for back-and-forth and an opportunity for creative collaboration.

“There are a lot of ideas flying around when we meet with the writers,” she said. “We have a lot of discussions where we can actually disagree, but I think it’s a really fruitful experience… It’s a process where we’re trying to get to the bottom of what will make this a great story.”

Often, these disagreements center around what details to include or leave out of the story to best convey the saint’s journey to God. What life events are most relevant? How do you more artfully convey those pivotal moments? Is there any room for legend or whimsy in these retellings? These are the questions The Merry Beggars team tackles together.

The retelling of George, the Dragon Slayer, for example, offered a particularly sticky conundrum.

“St. George is a saint that was a challenge because it’s historically grounded—We know there was a martyr, we know when he died—but we don’t have a lot of details. And there are a lot of stories that have grown up around him,” Lickona said, recalling the famous tale of the saint and the dragon. “So it was a matter of ‘What’s the way into this story?’ How do you tell a story that sounds pretty fantastical, almost sounds like a fairytale, but it’s a part of the way we understand that saint?”  

For Lickona, being so involved in this process is a blessing—not only professionally but personally. She said that a saint’s story “gets kind of lodged in your heart, and it plants seeds. It gives you different ways to talk to God; it gives you different ways to react to situations, because you see the possibilities in the lives of the saints that you didn’t see before.”

“I think the impact is potentially very, very big and in totally the best way. It’s a really huge, beautiful task that I have a small part in,” she said. “I’m extremely blessed with the stuff I get to do—extremely blessed.”

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Lisa Lickona joined Saint Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry in Rochester, New York, in 2021 as Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology after an eight-year stint as Editor for Saints at Magnificat. Her work focuses on the intersection of holiness and life as expressed in the lives of the saints and the Church’s theological anthropology. Lisa is co-editor of The Relevance of the Stars: Christ, Culture, Destiny by Lorenzo Albacete, a regular essayist for the Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton Shrine (setonshrine.org), and research director for a new audio adventure series on the saints produced by The Merry Beggars at Relevant Radio. She earned her B.A. at the University of Notre Dame and holds the Masters in Theological Studies and Licentiate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. She has lived with her large family in the Finger Lakes region of New York for almost twenty years.

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