Homily - The Solemnity of All Saints - 1 November 2024

The Solemnity of All Saints

Dear brothers and sisters,

What keeps each of us from becoming a saint, from hastening after them, from imitating their example of loving God and neighbor? The answer, I suspect, is a false understanding of who the saints are.

Those unfamiliar with them tend to think the Saints are those who lived perfect lives, who never grew angry or impatient, who always acted with wisdom and dignity, and who rarely sinned. Those who think of the Saints in this way see them either as impossible guides to follow or as personifications of boredom or obnoxiousness. If this is how we view the Saints, it is no wonder we do not strive to join their ranks.

But those who read the accounts of their lives know this assumption about them to be quite false. Rather, the saints are, as J.R.R. Tolkien – the author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings - once described them, "those who have for all their imperfections never finally bowed heart and will to the world or the evil spirit."[1]

The choice of words the Professor employs is simply another way of saying what we hear every year at this time, but seldom believe: the Saints are like you and like me. They were tempted and struggled and sinned - and repented. What, then, is the difference between us and them?

The Saints, we might say, kept the end goal, the final victory, always before them. They knew they would struggle and sin, yet they never lost sight of the merciful love of God because they knew his hand would always catch their repentant hearts and gently place them back on the narrow way that leads to the Father's house. This is what Tolkien means when he says they never finally bowed heart and will to the world or the evil spirit; they did not, in the end, keep their focus on themselves, but kept it instead on God.

Having died in the service of God and in his friendship, the Saints received "the crown of life," as Saint John described in an earlier part of the Book of Revelation (Revelation 2:10). We see the bestowing of these crowns depicted in one of my favorite medieval manuscript images. The illumination shows Jesus enthroned in the center of the image, handing out small crowns to men and women on either side of him.

The circle of Johannes von Valenburg, ca. 1299

What I especially like about this image is the littleness of those receiving their crowns from the hands of the Lord as the Blessed Virgin Mary and (presumably) Saint John the Evangelist look on; the ones being crowned are, at most, half the size of Jesus, almost Hobbitlike, if you will. Through his eyes, Jesus even seems to confer with Saint John as to which of the little ones is worthy of a crown.

The size of the figures awaiting their crowns, some already halo-ed, reminds me of some of my favorite words Tolkien wrote in his essay "On Fairy Stories," namely, that "in God's kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed man is still man."

Here on earth, we tend to be intimidated by the presence of the greatest – Saints, though they be. We see how fully the Saints entrusted themselves to God and it that trust cost them. We see their complete trust in God, at least at the end of their lives, and we see our failures to trust and love God. But, my brothers and sisters, we need not be afraid to fully entrust ourselves into the hand of God. If the saints, with their multi-faceted personalities and, yes, with their imperfections, could do so, so can we!

The only thing standing in the way of my growth in holiness is me; the only thing standing in the way of your growth in holiness is you. Let us, then, like trusting children, stretch out our little hands to the strong hand of the Lord Jesus so he might lead us along the way of his Saints. Let us allow him to do so either gently or with some prodding, so that we, small as we are by comparison to him, might stand among the company of the Saints and wear the same crown them. Amen.

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[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 93 To Christopher Tolkien, 30 January 1945. In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Revised and Expanded Edition. Humphrey Carpenter, ed. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2023), 159.

Homily - Why are there so few American saints?

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.

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.

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[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.

Homily - 1 November 2018 - The Solemnity of All Saints

The Solemnity of All Saints

Dear brothers and sisters,

Within the celebration of the Holy Mass, after the offering of the bread and wine mixed with a little water and before the celebrant washes his hands, the rubric for the Priest reads as follows: “After this, the Priest, bowing profoundly, says quietly: With humble spirit and contrite heart may we be accepted by you, O Lord, and may our sacrifice in your sight this day be pleasing to you, Lord God.”[1] Consequently, these are not words many people ever hear, but they are nonetheless worthy of our consideration today.

The first aspect to consider is the pronoun. The priest does not say “may I be accepted by you,” not even if he offers the Mass with no server or congregation; he says “we.” He does not speak in the royal we, meaning only himself, but meaning the entire people gathered at the altar, those who have come to render praise to God. “The true congregation is a gathering of those who belong to Christ, the holy people of God, united by faith and love… This we is not spontaneous, but the carefully nurtured fruit of genuine congregation.”[2] The priest, then, speaking on behalf of the congregation, asks the Lord to accept not only the gifts of bread and wine, which will soon be changed into the very Body and Blood of Christ, but also each person, so as to incorporate us into the Body of Christ.

The second aspect to consider is the word humble. In an age in which self-confidence is seen as an important virtue and something greatly to be desired, the virtue of humility often strikes us as something quite foreign. The humble, we think, are weak, and the self-confident strong and independent, two American characteristics which – if we are honest - do not sit comfortably in the Christian life because, as Saint Thomas Aquinas tells us, “humility suppresses hope or confidence in self more than it uses it; wherefore excessive self-confidence is more opposed to humility than lack of confidence is.”[3] The Saints are not those who trusted in themselves; rather, they are those who acknowledged their weaknesses and very dependence on the mercy of God.

In The Etymologies, Saint Isidore of Seville tells us the word humility is closely related to the Latin homo acclines humus, meaning “the man bent to the ground.”[4] The one who is humble bends toward the earth because he keeps in mind and heart the truth of his own existence. He or she remembers what we hear on Ash Wednesday: “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” This is why humility “is the foundation of prayer,” and why the priest bows profoundly as he makes this prayer; he knows the proper posture before God is one of submission and humble adoration.[5]

The third aspect of this quiet prayer of the priest is the phrase “contrite heart.” It is a phrase taken from the lips of King David who sang, “My sacrifice, O God, is a contrite spirit; a contrite, humbled heart, O God, you will not scorn” (Psalm 51:17). David was very much aware of the depth of his sinfulness and that he could not trust in own strength; he entrusted himself instead to the mercy of God and offered himself to the Lord. Would that we all followed his example, acknowledging our sinfulness and offering ourselves to the Lord, keeping in mind the warning of Saint James that “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6).

The fourth and final aspect to consider is the petition that we be “accepted by you.” It is worth noting that this is not in the active voice, but in the passive. We cannot simply walk into God’s presence on our own initiative; rather, we must be received by him. What we do here in the Lord’s sanctuary is not our own action, but his; it is for his honor and glory and the praise of name; we are participants in the worship of heaven. He summons us into his presence; we give him what is right and just; and he gives us himself. All of this is pure gift.

The great multitude of Saints whom we honor today and for whom we give grateful praise are those who humbled themselves before God and, trusting not in themselves but in God’s merciful love, acknowledged their sinfulness. They are those who offered themselves to God and who have been received into his presence and united to himself because their lives of faith, hope, and love were pleasing to God.

So it is that we have gathered this evening at the altar of the Lord to heed these words of our heavenly patron, Saint Augustine of Hippo:

…let us celebrate their feasts, as indeed we are doing, with the utmost devotion, soberly cheerful, gathered in a holy assembly, thinking faithful thoughts, confidently proclaiming their sanctity. It is no small part of imitation to rejoice together in the virtues of those who are better than we are. They are great, we are little; but “the Lord has blessed the little with the great.” They have gone ahead of us, they tower over us like giants. If we are not capable of following them in action, let us follow in affection; if not in glory, then certainly in joy and gladness; if not in merit, then in desire; if not in suffering, then in fellow feeling; if not in excellence, then in our close relationship with them.[6]

Because friends become like friends, may we, through ever-deepening friendship with the Saints, become like them and be found pleasing to God, that we, too, may be accepted by him and received into so great a company. Amen.

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[1] “The Order of Mass,” Roman Missal, 26.

[2] Romano Guardini, Meditations Before Mass, (Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 1993), 100.

[3] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q. 161, art. 2, ad. 2.

[4] Cf. Saint Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies, X.

[5] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2559.

[6] Saint Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 280.6.

Homily - 1 November 2016 - The Solemnity of All Saints

The Solemnity of All Saints

Dear brothers and sisters,

Mother Church encourages us to “rejoice in the Lord, as we celebrate the feast day in honor of all the Saints, at whose festival the Angels rejoice and praise the Son of God” (Introit). As we contemplate this great panoply of heroes and exemplars, we see the wide spectrum of humanity. We see men and women, boys and girls, rich and poor, the famous and the unknown. There are monarchs and peasants, teachers and students, nurses and patients, prisoners and free, explorers and home-bodies, and, of course, the great martyrs. And there is room in their number for you and me.

All Saints from the Laudario of Sant'Agnese, Master of the Dominican Effigies, about 1340

As we gaze upon their wondrous multitude and ponder the stories of their lives, we cannot help but ask what holds this diverse group together. Their lives were all very different from each others, yet now they are bound together in an unbreakable bond of love. Each one of them, like each one of us, was baptized into Christ Jesus so “that we may be called the children of God” and might be made pure, “as he is pure” (I John3:1, 3). Because they grew into a union with Christ Jesus through a death like his, they stand now “before the throne and before the Lamb” (cf. Romans 6:5; Revelation 7:9). We, too, are called to do the same; in fact, our principle duty in life is to grow into a full union with the Lord Jesus, to become saints, but how do we do this?

The great J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, once referred to the saints as “those who have for all their imperfections never finally bowed heart and will to the world and the evil spirit.”[1] Through their struggles and adversities, they maintained their allegiance to Christ and strove to live always in his love.

In the end, they desired friendship with Jesus more than anything else; they stopped at nothing to remain his friends. They remembered what we too often forget, namely, that

God wants [our] friendship. And once you enter into friendship with god, everything in your life begins to change. As you come to know him better, you find you want to reflect something of his infinite goodness in your own life. You are attracted to the practice of virtue. You begin to see greed and selfishness and all the other sins for what they really are, destructive and dangerous tendencies that cause deep suffering and do great damage, and you want to avoid falling into that trap yourselves. You begin to feel compassion for people in difficulties and you are eager to do something to help them. You want to come to the aid of the poor and the hungry, you want to comfort the sorrowful, you want to be kind and generous. And once these things begin to matter to you, you are well on the way to becoming saints.[2]

The saints invite us join their company and they show us the way to never finally bow our heart and will to the Evil One.

Very often, all that separates us from them is our weak desire – our less than fervent desire – for the friendship of Jesus. Thinking holiness too far beyond us, we listen to the temptations of the Evil One. We allow him to magnify our imperfections and then we allow our desire for friendship with Jesus to lessen and fade. We forget that the tempter is “a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44) and so rob ourselves of the Lord’s grace. Even so, the Lord still calls out us to us and stirs our hearts to seek his face (cf. Psalm 24:6).

In truth, holiness is not beyond us. The Lord calls each of us to be holy. He does not ask us to do the impossible, but fills us with his grace each day. If we cooperate with his grace, holiness is very near to each one of us; it is only a confession and firm purpose of amendment of life away.

It might seem strange to say so, but holiness, really, is as easy as one, two, three. This, at least, was the message of the Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI at one of his General Audience Addresses. After speaking of the call to holiness, he asked, “What is the essential?” His answer consisted of three things:

The essential means never leaving a Sunday without an encounter with the Risen Christ in the Eucharist; this is not an additional burden but is light for the whole week. It means never beginning and never ending a day without at least a brief contact with God. And, on the path of our life it means following the “signposts” that God has communicated to us in the Ten Commandments, interpreted with Christ, which are merely the explanation of what love is in specific situations.[3]

The three steps to holiness, then, are these: go to Mass every Sunday and holyday; begin and end every day with prayer; and make every decision according to the light of the Ten Commandments. These three steps, he said, are “the true simplicity and greatness of a life of holiness.”[4]

Holiness really is that simple, but this does not mean holiness is easy. Holiness is simple because it means loving God and loving our neighbor with all our mind, soul, body, and strength. Holiness is simple because it has one focus, but loving in this way is not easy because love always requires a sacrifice.

May we never waver from taking up the Cross or shrink away from it because of its difficulty! Rather, let us always keep the essential before us and hope in the promised reward of seeing God face to face (cf. Matthew 5:12)! May the example and intercession of the Saints help us to desire friendship with God above all else. Amen!

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[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter to Christopher Tolkien, 30 January 1945. In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Humphrey Carpenter, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 110.

[2] Pope Benedict XVI, Address to Catholic School Students, 17 September 2010.

[3] Ibid., General Audience Address, 13 April 2011.

[4] Ibid.

In the throne room of heaven, where is the Holy Spirit?

With their vibrant colors, playfulness, and blatant disregard for proportion, the illuminations found in the medieval manuscripts always delight my imagination and my desire for beauty.

Earlier today, while perusing my Twitter feed, I saw just such an image shared by Robert Miller in preparation for the celebrations of All Saints Day:

MS 18850 f. 275r

The illumination, of course, depicts the multitude of the Saints before the throne of God, where we see depicted God the Father and God the Son. The image is charming, but it left me what seemed an obvious question: Where is God the Holy Spirit?

As I pondered this question, it occurred to me that the answer is as obvious as the question itself: the Holy Spirit is within the hearts of the Saints.

Saint Paul instructs us to "guard the truth that has been entrusted to you by the Holy Spirit who dwells within you" (II Timothy 1:14). What is more, he also tells us that in Christ, God "has put his seal upon us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee" (II Corinthians 1:22).

The Holy Spirit took up his dwelling within our hearts on the day of our baptism into Christ Jesus, and his presence within us was strengthened through the sacrament of Confirmation. This is why Saint Paul also rhetorically asks, "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body" (I Corinthians 6:19-20).

The men and women whose faithful witness we sill soon celebrate are those who followed the promptings of the Holy Spirit dwelling within them and strove daily to glorify God in all things by keeping free of sin. By the aid of their powerful their intercession, may we, too, glorify God in all things and so join them before the throne of God.

In honor of the day

Every place has its own Saint. This is good because in this way we see the range of colours of God's one light and of his love which comes close to us. It means discovering the Saints in their beauty, in their drawing close to me in the Word, so that in a specific Saint I may find expressed precisely for me the inexhaustible Word of God, and then all the aspects of parochial life, even the human ones.

- Pope Benedict XVI

Homily - 1 November 2007 - All Saints Day

Today's homily is shamelessly taken, in large measure and condensed, from the homily of Pope Benedict XVI given 1 November 2006.

Why do we celebrate and honor the Saints today? They have no need of our honor, and our praise of them adds nothing to the joy they experience now and the glory that is theirs. Why, then, do we make so much of them today?

To honor the Saints means that we think back on their lives, that we look to them, and to look to the Saints is to be filled with a great and holy longing. The shining example of the Saints reawakens within us the great longing to be like them; happy to live near God, in his light, in his family. Being a Saint means living close to God, to live in his family.

What distinguishes us from the Saints? It is the fact that whereas we all too often live as though God did not exist, the Saints knew very well that without God’s existence they would not live.

How can we become holy, friends of God? To be a Saint requires neither extraordinary actions nor the possession of exceptional gifts. It is necessary, first of all, to listen to Jesus and then to follow him without losing heart when faced by difficulties.

From the lives of the Saints we see that every form of holiness, even if it follows different paths, always passes through the Way of the Cross, the way of self-denial. Their biographies describe men and women who, docile to the divine plan, sometimes faced unspeakable trials and suffering, persecution and martyrdom. They persevered in their commitment.

The example of the Saints encourages us to follow in their same footsteps and to experience the joy of those who trust in God, for the one true cause of sorrow and unhappiness is to live far from him.

Holiness demands a constant effort, but it is possible for everyone because, rather than a human effort, it is first and foremost a gift of God.

It is God who loved us first and made us his adoptive sons in Jesus. Everything in our lives is a gift of his love: how can we be indifferent before such a great mystery? How can we not respond to the Heavenly Father's love by living as grateful children? In Christ, he gave us the gift of his entire self and calls us to a personal and profound relationship with him.

Consequently, the more we imitate Jesus and remain united to him the more we enter into the mystery of his divine holiness. We discover that he loves us infinitely, and this prompts us in turn to love our brethren. Loving always entails an act of self-denial, "losing ourselves", and it is precisely this that makes us happy.

If we wish to be truly happy, let each of us follow the witness of the Saints and embrace Christ Jesus above all else that we, too, might live with the Saints in light. Amen.

You might also read His Holiness' Angelus Address given on 1 November 2006.