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The word "saint" has more than one meaning. We use it in ordinary talk to signify someone who is conspicuous for goodness or generosity. "She took care of her invalid husband for years. She’s a saint." In a Catholic Christian context we use "saint" to mean somebody who has been officially proposed to the faithful as a model and intercessor. These are people whose virtue exceeded ordinary human virtue and whose lives have been carefully examined in the process of canonization. St. John Neumann and St. Elizabeth Seton are saints in this sense. The New Testament uses the word "saint" to signify women and men who are believers in Christ, who are members of the Church. Paul, for example, addresses Second Corinthians to "the saints [or holy ones] throughout Achaia." There are almost sixty occurrences of the word’s being used this way in the New Testament.
Catholics have venerated the saints for a long time. At the beginning, they offered special attention only to those who had given their lives to the faith in martyrdom. Then they began to include men and women who had suffered for the faith, even though they had not been killed for it. Later the veneration of the saints included hermits and saintly bishops, as well as religious and priests and lay persons.
The history of a liturgical celebration in honor of All Saints is not fully clear, but it is clear that on this one day we are invited to offer our thanks and praise to God for all saints of all kinds, known and unknown, canonized or not.
The second reading for All Saints Day is from First John and offers us a reminder of what is involved in being a saint.
The author invites his readers to be attentive to the fact that they are really and truly children of God. If the world does not recognize them as such, it’s because the world doesn’t recognize God, either. Moreover, our present relationship with God is only the beginning. There are still deeper degrees of association and likeness in store for us that we are not yet aware of or acquainted with. Being children of God is a source of hope, but it also demands a response from us, and that response is being pure as God is pure, i.e., living a godly life in accord with the godliness that has been given us.
One of the most important truths of our faith is that holiness, i.e., being a child or God or being a saint is not something that we are called to achieve or acquire, but something that we are invited to accept. None of us can make him or herself holy. None of us can earn or deserve to become a member of the Trinitarian family of God. We can only respond to the holiness that we receive when we begin to live the life of Christ through baptism. Holiness or saintliness is a gift, not a recompense for our spiritual accomplishments.
This is not to say that our holiness does not involve effort and that Christian life is just a matter of sitting back and enjoying what God has given us. On the contrary, God expects us to work hard at living up to what we have been made to be in Christ. God’s grace and holiness in us demand a posture of continued purification, of ongoing work to allow God’s gifts to be ever more effective in our lives. After all, thanks to original sin, we are constitutionally inclined to selfishness, to wanting to snatch control of our lives away from God. If we allow ourselves just to drift along, we will drift into alienation from God. We won’t be saints any more, not because God has changed His mind and taken holiness away from us, but because we have rejected it by our indifference and self-centeredness.
The "official" saints, the kinds of people the Church canonizes, are those who are most aware of their own vulnerability, most conscious of their own need for God’s action in their lives, most alert to the role of God’s generosity in their human existence. Consequently, their response to the life of Christ in them is more generous and more consistent than that of the rest of us, to the point of reaching even heroic proportions.
But their holiness is the same as ours, because there is only one kind of holiness, and that holiness is constituted by sharing in the life of the risen Christ. That’s what made the Blessed Mother a saint. That’s what lay at the foundation of the holiness of the martyrs. That’s what gave inspiration and energy to the Church’s great preachers and teachers and ascetics and apostles. That’s what constitutes the holiness of each and every one of us.
This annual celebration of all saints reminds us that the saints are not all alike. There are many different kinds of saints. It also reminds us that the saints are not just those whose names are on some official list somewhere. Many saints - perhaps most saints - are not known to us by name. Finally, this feast reminds us that, to the extent that the life of Christ is still in us, we are all saints. The only question is the extent to which we respond to the gift of sainthood we have received.
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Conversation Questions.
Who are the saints who have played a part in my life?
In what ways does my sainthood manifest itself?
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