When Harvard meets holiness, you get a woman like Ruth: a wife, mother of six, and fierce defender of life who lived ordinary days with extraordinary love. Before her death at just 41, she managed what most of us fear: to suffer without self-pity, to labor without resentment, and to die without despair. Now the Vatican is taking a closer look, asking whether this quiet storm of grace could be the Church’s next saint.
Ruth’s husband, Michael, spoke on Marriage Unhindered about what it was like to live alongside such a woman. He described a life that was full, not of luxury or ease, but of sanctity in motion. “We qualified for food stamps during all those years,” he said. “We had one car, usually broken down. But she was burning with zeal to do as much good as she could for the unborn while she had strength.”
That zeal did not fade even as cancer consumed her body. Two weeks before she died, Ruth climbed Mount Washington with a metal rod in her leg. She was a woman convinced that time, however little, must be given back to God in love.
Ruth’s holiness was not some mystical abstraction. It was fiercely practical. Michael admits they often argued about one thing: scheduling. He hated it; she insisted on it. Her reason? “If you do not schedule, then you cannot use your time well to accomplish the most good.
It’s the kind of line that could be stitched onto a pillow or written in a saint’s diary. Ruth’s sainthood didn’t come from dramatic visions but from order in service of love. She saw every hour as an offering.
Their marriage was as real as any. Disagreements, exhaustion, even emotional mismatches filled their home. “We risked going off on separate tracks,” Michael confessed that he buried himself in scholarship while she threw herself into pro-life work. Yet, grace has a way of mending the cracks before the final curtain. The summer before she died, they found their unity again.
One of the most heartbreaking moments came when Ruth found their infant son, Thomas, had died in his crib. Rigor mortis had already set in. His tiny arms were outstretched “like a little cross.” Ruth didn’t collapse; she gathered the family, called the priest, and led them all in the rosary around the baby’s body.
It’s hard to imagine that kind of composure. But her Marian instinct took over — “a dignified suffering,” Michael called it. Like Our Lady at Calvary, Ruth stood. She bore what no mother should, yet without bitterness. Later, she would tell a grieving friend, “The pain never goes away, but it heals like a wound.”
In a world allergic to discomfort, Ruth’s life shatters the illusion that holiness and happiness come from ease. She teaches us that sanctity is not about being unscathed but about being unyielding in love.
Saint Paul wrote, “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Romans 5:3–4). Ruth lived that line with every broken car, every sleepless night, every cancer treatment, every tear.
We can’t all climb mountains with rods in our legs, but we can all use the time we have to do the good God asks of us, even if it’s just keeping the faith through another exhausting Tuesday.
Because holiness, Ruth reminds us, is not found in the extraordinary. It’s found in how we live the ordinary extraordinarily well.
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