Why do some Catholics seem extraordinarily gifted spiritually while most of us feel ordinary?

This is true in every area of human society; in religion, science, or economics there are people who excel and people who do not, and that is human nature. But I want to prepare you for reality: be careful of the lives of the saints you read, because a lot of the bad is taken out and a lot of the good is exaggerated. Even Butler, in Butler's Lives of the Saints, admitted that some of it is exaggerated and we cannot tell whether it is true; people who love someone ignore the bad and promote the good until the person looks like a saint. I named my own daughter after St. Therese of Lisieux, but with all the lives of the saints, be careful. One I always have problems with is Mother Teresa: if you look into the day-to-day nitty-gritty of her life, as told by the nuns under her and the officials she dealt with, and at her own theology that everybody is saved, she was not the woman the world imagines, however much good she did in Calcutta. It is like the aura around John Kennedy when I was growing up, later dissipated when we learned what he was really like. So take that as a lesson of hype versus reality. Yes, there are saints who genuinely excel and live holy lives, and we want to be like them, but there is also a great deal of legend and myth you have to separate out; so do not feel so bad.