The Solemnity of All Saints
Dear brothers and sisters,
In a recent news article, a Catholic journalist asked an important question: “Where are the American saints?”[1] He lists a few practical reasons and he encourages us to pray for the canonization of those Americans whose causes are underway, but never really suggests adequate reason.
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| Detail, Hours of Louis de Laval, BnF, Latin 920, f. 180r |
As we commemorate today all of the Saints who enjoy the vision of God, we are aware that
holiness is always the refutation of the idea that time plays an essential role in Christianity; strangely enough, the reverse is true: our temporal distance allows us to come more directly to the source: namely, to the revelation of Christ.[2]
What does it mean to say that time is not essential in Christianity?
We can get an idea of what this means by considering Saint Francis of Assisi. Without question, he
was a new light on the Gospel; perhaps, as the distance [of time since his life] increases, he will be understood more and more as the summit of the middle ages in his relationship to revelation. The true peak rises as the distance grows; we must take care not to consider our own age as an age without salvation or saints. Everything depends on the awareness that we have of our Christianity. For Francis, to be a Christian was something just as intense, certain and startlingly glorious as to be a human being, a youth, a man. And because being a Christian is eternal being and eternal youth, without danger of withering and resignation, his immediate joy was deeper. Not one single year separated him from Christ, the one who had become flesh; from the manger; from the Cross. For him, not one speck of dust had settled on the freshness of the wonder in the passage of time. The hodie [today] of the liturgy on the great feasts was the hodie of his life. Is there a saint who has had any other Christian consciousness of time?[3]
Too few of us think like Saint Francis; too few of us think like any of the saints.
If we are to consider why there are so few American saints, this must be the answer: we think of Christ Jesus as having lived two thousand years ago, and not as someone who accompanies us and whom we can accompany. The recognition of the closeness of the Lord is what made them saints. They did not consider him as someone distant from them, but as someone right next to them.
We see something of us this in artistic depictions of centuries gone by. The great painters showed Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and the Apostles, in the clothing of their own time. We look at their artworks and think the artists were being anachronistic or that they lacked knowledge of history and the way in which sartorial fashions changed. However, they were showing something completely different, that irrelevancy of time in relation to holiness.
The saints drew close to Jesus because they knew that no passage of time could separate them from him. If we recognize the same, there will be innumerable American saints. May we be counted among them. Amen.
[1] Charles Collins, “As we approach All Saints Day, the lack of American saints stands out,” Crux, 30 October 2022. Accessed 1 November 2022. Available at https://cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2022/10/as-we-approach-all-saints-day-the-lack-of-american-saints-stands-out.
[2] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Raising the Bastions: On the Church in this Age. Brian McNeil, trans. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 27.
[3] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Raising the Bastions: On the Church in this Age. Brian McNeil, trans. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 32.
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