Solemnity of All Saints

Solemnity of All Saints
(Replaces Dominica XXXI per Annum)
1 November 2026

We believe in God who is holy and who is the source of all things.  We believe that we are His children.  And that should mean that the marks of His life are seen within us.  The holiness of God is like our spiritual DNA, marking us as coming from and destined for our Heavenly Father.  We celebrate holiness and we believe that we too are called to holiness of life.  In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed when we say that the Church is “holy” we are not speaking of the buildings of the church, the places where we gather. Rather, we are speaking of the Body of the Church, that living unity that is composed of the Head of the Body, Jesus the Lord who is God Himself, and we are referring to the members of the Body who by faith and holy baptism have been joined to Christ. Why do we believe that the Church is holy? And why do we continue to believe this even though there have been bad events and terrible sinners in the Church? The Church is holy because her founder and maker is the all-holy God. What he establishes and gathers together is holy. We know that the Church is composed of human beings who are sinners. But the Church is holy because God Himself has died to purify her and save her. Thus, holiness is truly an attribute of the reality of the Church’s being, even though holiness must still be worked out in the lives of we the members here in this life. On All Saints’ Day we celebrate the holiness manifest in the members of the Church in every time and place. The Apostles’ Creed makes this connection more explicit when it says, “I believe in the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints”.

The communion of saints is the gathering of all of the holy ones of God.  There are individual saints we celebrate on a particular calendar day in the Sacred Liturgy. On the Solemnity of All Saints, we are celebrating too the many more saints who are not as known or named with a particular feast day, but who are part of the great cloud of witnesses in Heaven (cf. Heb. 12:1).  The vision of St. John in the first reading communicates the immensity and the variety of God’s holy ones. Revelation tells us that the number of those marked with the seal of the living God was one hundred and forty-four thousand “from every tribe of the children of Israel”. But the vision goes on to report still more when it says, “After this I had a vision of a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue. They stood before the throne and before the Lamb.” This solemnity is a “catch-all” of sorts. In celebrating the holiness of the saints, both the known and the unknown, we admit that we are called to be saints.  And what’s more, despite a tendency to cynicism, holiness and being a saint IS attainable, thanks to our Heavenly Father’s plan of the redemption won for us in Christ Jesus, thanks to the grace of the sacraments, and thanks to our dedicated zeal to use our energies to cooperate with grace and to reform our lives as disciples.  It is God who makes it possible for us to be saints; it is our cooperation with His grace that helps bring that about in our time and place.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about processions. We see processions all the time at Holy Mass. We recently had the Three Hearts Pilgrimage in eastern Oklahoma, a procession of around three thousand people. Today, I hope you plan to be at the Eucharistic Procession at St. John’s, at 2:30 pm, gathering all Edmond parishes to carry the Lord’s Real Presence out in public and to demonstrate our faith that he is Emmanuel, God-with-us. Processions and pilgrimages on foot have become an image for me of the communion of the saints. In the past, I viewed the saints as having finished the race of faith and being so distinct from us as to be almost separated from us. They have finished and are now enjoying their victory. Those ideas are not entirely incorrect or inappropriate. But procession and pilgrimage has provided a bit of a correction of those notions, in the sense that though finished with the race, the saints are still one with us in this journey. They are not so distinct as to be disconnected from us.  Think of one example from the Bible of an immense procession. The Bible tells us about six hundred thousand military-aged Hebrew males, plus women and children, were in the desert wandering toward the Promised Land (cf. Ex. 12:37). Imagine being part of that procession that lasted for forty years. Now, when one day Joshua finally crossed over in the lead into the Promised Land imagine the cheering that would have broken out and the sound wave making its way back through all the ranks of Israel still waiting to cross over. I imagine the people in the back of the line probably couldn’t exactly see when Joshua crossed over. But they could hear the cheering. And can’t you imagine those still in the procession, waiting to cross, already celebrating the entrance even though they themselves had not yet stepped into the Promised Land? Furthermore, do we imagine that those Jews who crossed over first then stopped caring about the rest of the people still behind them? No, they made room for them and kept the celebration going until all had fully entered the blessing of the place of promise.

Likewise in the communion of saints, we still striving here for increased holiness and entrance into heaven celebrate the confidence we have that so many before us have lived in this body in this world and have crossed over to be with God. We already celebrate the victory even though our feet must still make the passage. And we do not believe the saints are so separate from us that they fail to care for us. They cheer us on and they make room for us, as it were. You see, far from being separated and distant, they and we are part of the same procession, the same pilgrimage to Heaven. From our point of view in the long procession of history, our cheering for the saints, the heroes of the faith, joins with the jubilant encouragement of the saints already in heaven to form one triumphant voice saying, “Lord this is the people that longs to see your face!”