I know of at least one saint who is married: my wife. (She has to be a saint, being married to me. Really.)

But the official communion of saints doesn’t, otherwise, include a lot of people who shared a marriage bed — a truly peculiar oversight. An overwhelming number are nuns, priests, monks or long-suffering virgins of one type or another.

But this weekend, the number of married people officially on the path to sainthood will rise by two.

From the Wall Street Journal:

After their wedding in Alençon, France, on July 13, 1858, Louis Martin and Zélie Guérin refrained from sex for 10 months. The impetus for that arrangement, known as a “Josephite marriage” (after the celibate relationship between St. Joseph and his wife, Mary), came from Louis, who had earlier hoped to enter a monastery. Eventually, a frustrated Zélie escorted her husband to a local priest, who assured them that raising children was a sacred activity.

They took his advice: Before her death in 1877, Zélie bore nine children — five of whom joined religious orders.

We would know little about Louis or Zélie were it not for their youngest daughter, Thérèse, who entered a Carmelite monastery in Lisieux and became one of the church’s most popular saints. St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the “Little Flower,” was canonized in 1925.

This Sunday in the basilica of Lisieux, Louis and Zélie will be beatified, the Catholic church’s final step before canonization, positioning them to join the rarefied company of saints who were married. That brief list includes Saints Peter, Monica, Thomas More and the American-born Elizabeth Ann Seton. The roster of saints married to one another is even shorter: Isadore and Maria, 10th-century Spanish farmers, are among the few.

The Lisieux ceremony follows the Vatican’s approval, in July, of the required miracle — the healing of a man with a malformation of the lung. But the beatification raises questions about the models of life being presented to Catholics. What can a man and woman who planned to live celibately say to married couples today?

The two traditional roles of the saints are the patron (who intercedes on behalf of those on earth) and the companion (who provides believers with an example of Christian life). And the paucity of lay saints — more specifically, married ones — in the roster is somewhat embarrassing.

Two reasons underlie this anomaly: the outmoded belief, almost as old as the church, that the celibate life was “better” than married life, and the fact that the church’s canonization process is an arduous one, requiring someone to gather paperwork, interview contemporaries if that is still possible and present the case to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

Certainly there have been as many saintly wives and husbands as there have been holy priests and nuns. But religious orders and dioceses know how to navigate the canonization procedures on behalf of bishops, priests, brothers and sisters. By contrast, how many families have the resources to embark on the decades-long process on behalf of even the holiest mother or father? As a result, married Catholics have few exemplars other than Mary and Joseph, whose situation was hardly replicable.

There’s much more at the link, so drop by.