Become a Saint by Succeeding in Business: A Practical Guide to Integrating Faith and Work

Following is an excerpt from Chapter 24 of Become a Saint by Succeeding in Business by Joseph Valentic. This is not a sponsored post. Published by the St. Josemaria Institute with permission.

LEVERAGING THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS IN OUR BUSINESS

God has blessed us tremendously with the gift of the Communion of Saints, both for our personal lives and for our business lives. If you are not tapping into the Communion of Saints for your business, you are truly wasting one of your greatest assets. God has given us the communion of saints to protect us, teach us, inspire us, and help us to know His will in our life and business. The saints offer a lifetime of wisdom, yet their teachings on holiness remain inexhaustible.

The beauty of the saints is that anyone can relate to them and learn from them. There are saints from all over the world, from all walks of life, of all ages, male and female, rich and poor, super intelligent to very simple. I have started writing and recording how the saints have interceded in my life. Over time, I began to see that God brought me the aid of different saints for different needs in my life. While each saint brought graces related to different times and issues in my life, I came to find myself returning to those saints for similar matters.

Recently, I made the decision to create my own litany of the saints. For reference, a litany is a prayer process in the Church that can either involve one saint or many. If the litany has many saints, it is often prayed in the form of “St. Peter, pray for us.” If the litany is focused on one saint, like St. Joseph, the litany will honor traits or holy titles of the saint as follows: “St. Joseph most faithful, pray for us.”

As I started praying my own litany of the saints, I also added the twist of asking each saint to pray for me related to how I came to know that saint, or for a specific trait they possess. For example, part of my litany goes as follows:

• St. Josemaria, help me to write this book on becoming a saint by succeeding in business.
• St. Peter Julian Eymard, teach me how to make the Eucharist the source, the love and the summit of my life.
• St. Benedict, help us to bring order to our home.

I have found this practice to bear great fruit in my life by keeping these important objectives at the forefront of my day. Secular personal development often emphasizes visualizing your desires daily. This is not some New Age concept. The reality is that what we put before our mind most consistently forms our paradigm for life and business. Leadership guru John Maxwell says that we are what we think and what we think is based on what we choose to put before our eyes on a regular basis. So adding something about each saint’s qualities or ways they help, and praying this daily, helps to keep those ideals in front of our mind, not to mention opening ourselves up to the saints’ help. Like God, the saints will not violate our will and the level of their help is ultimately governed by the measure of our devotion to them. The litany is a short and powerful tool to receive these great benefits of the saints.

In addition to the saints’ intercession, their lives are a veritable master class in how we can succeed in sainthood and entrepreneurial success. In the previous section of the book, we shared information on a variety saints that give us great examples of how to achieve holiness by succeeding in business and certain saints that were not in business, per se, but demonstrated incredible entrepreneurial traits, by allowing God to fully work through them. There are many examples of leaders of religious organizations that demonstrated amazing logistic and managerial skills, not to mention creative and industrious methods to generate money to support their organization. We can learn greatly from both the lay and religious saints.

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Joseph Valentic is a Catholic author, entrepreneur, apostolate founder, husband, and father. He has more than thirty-five years of diverse business and executive leadership experience. He also has twenty years of experience in Catholic apostolate and non-profit leadership. He is the founder of The Catholic Curator (catholiccurator.com) where you can find his books, blog, podcast to help you integrate the pursuit of success in business and sainthood.