David McLoughlin explores the origins of the Feast of All Saints' Day in our Catholic Churches: how are saints defined and how do we honour them? We are challenged by this inspiring call to live God's holiness in the everyday ordinary.
The veneration of the saints starts early in the life of the Church. The first Christian martyr, the deacon Stephen is celebrated in the Christian calendar the day after the birth of Jesus. During the time of persecution that followed Stephen’s death, nearly three hundred years, the church began to record the lives of the saints. In particular, this included their names and the place where they were martyred so that each year a Mass could be celebrated in their memory as near as possible to their place of execution. And it recorded the day of their birth in heaven, which became their feast day. From these practices came what is called the ‘Sanctoral Cycle’, the calendar of the saints. Initially, all those recorded were called red martyrs, those who had died for Christ were nominated and consecrated in the local communities from which they came. As time went by, they were joined by “white martyrs” those who lived heroically or in an exemplary way for Christ and in the service of others, especially the poor and vulnerable. So the title Saint or Holy One gradually became applied to men and women whose lives bore witness to a remarkable quality of self-gift.
As the Church grew and became more organised local Churches still proposed their holy men and women for veneration but sought the recognition and affirmation of the Churches’ leaders to include them in the “canon” of the authoritative list of the saints. This canonisation started from the communities that knew the men and women and was eventually recognised after their lives and acts, writings and sayings, were pondered and found to be orthodox. Later, the actual canonisation was reserved to the Pope. Today two miracles are usually required as a type of divine affirmation of the sanctity of the candidate.
Saints show us the possibility of living holy lives in the most varied and unlikely of circumstances and in any and every walk of life however unsympathetic. Always the holiness of the saint is the fruit of the divine call or to the offer of grace. And then to their generous, however initially halting, responses to new lives of conversion. The varied lives of the saints show us the deep potential goodness of the creation beyond individual sin and failure. They reveal the profound dignity of all human life created in God’s image. Their selfless lives show our call to communion, to the possibility of shared life with each other in God. They point to what is important in us, to what enables the divine image within us to shine out in the ordinariness of our daily lives. Or the Heaven in ordinary as the poet George Herbert puts it.
The saints show us that holiness is not just holding on to the right ideas or belonging to the right group so much as being “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Since the closer we get to Christ, the closer we get to God and to all those in the love of God in Christ. This is the peace the world of itself can never give. And the initial requirement from us is simply willingness not worthiness. A willingness to believe in the possibility of communion with God and peace with men and women and our fragmented planet. This, as Pope Francis reminds us, involves a willingness to dream. As sinners we say at Mass: “Lord I am not worthy…” but the words that follow “Only say the word and I shall be healed” are the hopeful words of the dream of sanctity.
Thankfully, holiness is not our ticket to enter the Church but the desire for holiness is. And if we act on that desire then we are cleansed from much more than the dust of life, a table where food is shared freely, and we enjoy a communion that takes us out of our isolation and into the company of many saints who may never be canonised but whose lives speak of Christ.
It is the breadth and depth of this communion of All Saints which we celebrate today; the heroic, brilliant, extraordinary, colourful ones, whose names we all know and whose churches we visit. But also the modest, stuttering, limping, quiet ones who are among us and healing and sustaining us in ways we will only know in the life to come. May it be so. Happy Feast Day!
David McLoughlin is Emeritus Fellow of Christian Theology at Birmingham Newman University.
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