Anthony Esolen wrote in Touchstone a few years ago his observations of how good and holy people such as Mother Teresa manage to provoke hatred of themselves. This caused him

“…to ask what it is about the holy that strikes fear into the hearts of so many. We think that the saints are beautiful, and they are. Then how do people miss it?

“Then again, why should we be surprised that they miss it, when in Jesus himself, as far as many a Pharisee would concede, no beauty was to be found? When Jesus wrought his signs and wonders, and when he taught with authority about the kingdom of God, what did those Pharisees ask him, but why his disciples did not wash their hands before eating, and suchlike? They had before them the Lord, the long-awaited anointed of God, who had made the blind to see and the deaf to hear, and somehow the truth could not penetrate the shells of their self-regard.

“For the holy is a challenge to us, and therefore an affront. It does not curry our favor. It does not mingle with the guests at parties in our own honor, eating cucumber sandwiches and speaking empty pleasantries. It is not nice. It stands in fearful judgment before us. The holy is set apart; its ways are not our ways; yet it calls us to surrender our ways, and to be converted.”

“Let us, finally, be quite clear about one thing. Those who believe in God, and who honor his holiness, longing to be transformed in mind and soul—they are the true and only humanists. They hold so high a view of man that, if they were to see a victim of cholera dying in a ditch in Calcutta, they would burn in shame that the image of God should be treated with such contempt; or should they see a rich man destroying his soul with the vices that money can buy, they would pray that he might someday see what man is called to be.”