All Saints' Day

Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven by Fra Angelico

My sermon for Sunday 31st October, the Solemnity of All Saints:

The Cult of the Saints has always occupied an important place in the Christian religion and admiration for the holiness of particular saints has always been an important part of individual Christians' spirituality.

In the Gospel reading for today's feast we heard that great list of blessings, the Beatitudes, from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, and the saints are the men and women in the history of Christianity who succeeded, maybe to a far greater degree than most ordinary believers, in making that list of spiritual qualities their main aim in life and their rule of life.

Our conviction, reflected in all the prayers for today's feast, is that by doing that, they achieved such a level of holiness or closeness to God during their lives on earth that they've already entered heaven, without the lengthy period of purification that most of us will need at the end of our lives. The saints, famous and not so famous, are the men and women who are already enjoying that direct vision of God described by St John in today's second reading, and they're active in guiding and inspiring and strengthening us in our effort to live the Gospel - if we ask for their help.

It's possible that devotion to many of the better-known saints is a less prominent feature of Catholicism than it used to be. But in fact this devotion is a very valuable aspect of the Christian faith because the saints show us how ordinary men and women, with different personalities and temperaments, living in all kinds of different historical cicrumstances, managed to follow the way of the Gospel wholeheartedly and radically.

When we read about the lives of the saints - especially perhaps about the life of some saint with whom we feel we can identify in terms of his or her personality, or in terms of the difficutlies or setbacks or periods of struggle that he or she faced, it's an encouragement to us to carry on in our own discipleship of Christ.

If children and young people, especially, can find some saint, or a few saints, with whom they can feel some kind of affinity - someone who appeals to their imagination and makes the challenges of Christian holiness vivid and attractive, then its a great support and spur for their own faith.

It's a pity if Catholic children grow up without knowing anything about any of the saints because if these concrete examples of holiness don't occupy at least some part of their imaginations then their minds will be filled instead with the images and values and the dubious example of the "role models" that our modern popular culture throws up.

Another aspect of today's feast that's worth emphasising I think is that it concentrates our minds on the ultimate goal of every Christian life: to be with God in eternity. In the Gospel Jesus presents the Beatitudes as the road that leads to that goal.

There's probably a temptation as we get older to lower our sights spiritually, to regard the kind of holiness that we associate with the saints as unrealistic and unattainable. We get tired, we settle for mediocrity, we think that it's enough to be a decent, honest, occasionally generous person. And of course those qualities do count for a lot: they're better than being dishonest, selfish and indiffrent to other people's needs.

But in our relationship with God, as in other areas of life, there's something to be said for aiming high, rather than compromising and settling for low standards. 

One of the features of the first few centuries of the Church's existence is the great emphasis that prophetic church leaders placed on maintaining high ideals of Christian life in spite of all the temptations to compromise with the values of the surrounding culture.

The result of that steadfastness - I hope I'm not over-simplifying that period of Christian history too much - was that the Church's faith came gradually to have a humanising effect on the culture at large. When we read about the teachings and actions of great saints like Augustine and Ambrose of Milan and John Chrysostom, and the way that they constantly measured the brutality and the injustice of so many aspects of their society according to the standard of the Sermon of the Mount, we can see how the effort to preserve the integrity of the Christian vision of life eventually raised the moral tone of the whole community.

I mention that because I wonder if the challenges we face today aren't very similar to the challenges confronted by our ancestors in the faith all those centuries ago. 

In those days Christianty didn't, for example, abolish the distinctions between rich and poor or strong and weak. But by stressing the inviolable dignity of all human beings - slaves as much as masters, as it were - the Christian faith mitigated the tendency of the higher classes of people to treat the members of the lower class without respect or even as disposable objects. It reminded the rich and powerful that they had moral obligations towards the poor and vulnerable on which God would judge them at the end of their lives.

The same is true of the attitude towards unwanted children. Abortion and infanticide was commonplace; whereas the Christian idea was that the weakest and most neglected persons were especially beloved of God, and therefore had to be especially cared-for and protected. 

It was a moral revolution, and it was only possible because of the way that the Church community saw the high standard of Christian holiness as something that had to permeate every area of human life, social as well as individual. Maybe, as some of these brutal and loveless attitudes are being revived in our own time, we can take inspiration from the great witness that was given by the saints of past centuries, preaching this principle of the dignity of every person as a child of God, and practicing what they preached by committing time and energy and church resources to the protection of the poorest and least-defended members of society.

So for all these reasons I think the Cult of the Saints is still a very valuable aspect of our Christian Faith, an aspect that we should try hard not to lose, especially in the circumstances that the Church community finds itself today.