Feast day: November 1

All Saints

Solemnity

Patron of —

The feast of every saint — canonized or known only to God: the 'great multitude which no one could count' already home in heaven.

On November 1 the Church celebrates All Saints — a single great feast honoring the whole company of the blessed in heaven, the countless multitude that no one can number, from every nation and age. It honors not only the famous saints with their own days in the calendar, but the vast majority who are unknown to us: the hidden, the forgotten, and the ordinary faithful who reached holiness without ever being named.

The feast grew from the early Church's veneration of the martyrs. As their numbers became too great for each to have a separate day, a common commemoration arose, and in the seventh century the Pantheon in Rome — once a temple to all the pagan gods — was consecrated as a church to Mary and all the martyrs. In the following centuries the feast was extended to honor all the saints and fixed on the first of November.

Its Gospel is the Beatitudes, Christ's portrait of the blessed — the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure of heart, those who hunger for righteousness and suffer for it — for these are the ones who fill heaven, and this is the road by which they came. The feast holds up the saints not as distant heroes but as the great family to which every Christian is called to belong.

It expresses the cherished belief in the 'communion of saints': that the Church on earth, the souls being purified, and the blessed in glory are one body, bound together in Christ and in prayer. The evening before, the 'Vigil of All Hallows,' gave us the name Halloween — and the next day, All Souls, the Church turns from honoring the saints in glory to praying for all the faithful departed.

Most saints are anonymous. Today is the feast of grandmothers, janitors, and martyrs whose names no one recorded — and the goal of every life.

Image: Fra Angelico (CC BY 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/01315a.htm