"...great cloud of witnesses and the power of intercession...."

Quite true, Jay Edward. The writer Flannery O'Connor probably best understood this "cloud of witnesses," among other things, this Catholic mist whose vast assemblage and grace-filled multitude in the past was created by ordinary folk who venerated them -- in spite of the experts, the priests, the theologians. By  contrast, the virtues of O'Connor's good respectable "Christian folk" like Mrs. Turpin (see short story, "Revelation") were the vices of Catholic saints, "virtues" to be avoided, expunged from their Christ-like witnessing. By the end of the story, those "virtues" (in Mrs.Turpin's epiphany) had to be burnt from Mrs. Turpin's kind of people before making it into Paradise, before linking up with the communion of saints (people, from Mrs. Turpin's perspective, who were ugly, paralleled in physical deformity -- in bodily appearance, parts, in the tracks of lines, blemishes on their faces -- to low life and murderers).