For Martyrs Only
In the earliest days of the Catholic Church, it was easy to decide who qualified for sainthood and who didn't: If you had been martyred, you were a saint--and if you hadn't, you weren't. It was that simple. Why? Because in its earliest form the veneration of saints was simply the survivors of persecutions honoring the memory of their fallen comrades. Each church kept a list of their important martyrs in the area, and on the anniversary of their death it celebrated mass at their tomb. If you weren't a martyr, their wasn't any reason to put you on the list.

The Right Stuff
But as the persecutions wound down at the end of the 3rd century, an inevitable question arose: How could a Christian who hadn't been persecuted achieve sainthood? Today, the answer is clear: You have to lead a holy life. But in the fourth century the solution wasn't so simple, and the early Christians--with the crucifixion and their own just-ended persecutions so strongly etched in their memory--came to a different conclusion: It was whether you had suffered as Jesus had that proved you were a saint. And since the Romans were no longer inflicting suffering on the Christians, the Christians began inflicting it on themselves.

The Ascetics
A new catagory of saint was born: the "slow martyr," "white martyr," or ascetic. By denying himself the pleasures of the world--which in many cases included food, clothing, shelter, sleep and hygiene--the ascetic "confessed" his faith to God and human alike. Ken Woodward says in his book Making Saints, "To the Church, the slow 'white martyrdom' of the ascetics was the virtual equivalent of the immediate 'red' martyrdom of those who actually shed their blood. Most of the ascetics practiced relatively mild forms of austerity such as shunning material possessions or fasting periodically.