Every one of us, by the grace of God, can become a saint

Bishop Peter Muhich
Homily from the Solemnity of All Saints
November 1, 2022

Every nation, race, people, and tongue. Today’s readings are about saints and how to become a saint. Our first reading from the book of Revelation, contains that great vision of the heavenly gathering. A great vision of saints and angels gathered around the throne of the lamb in heaven – they who have washed their robes clean in the blood of the lamb and now celebrate the fullness of life in God’s kingdom. 

Our second reading from first John, which tells us that we are God’s children, and although we don’t know exactly what it will be like in heaven, we will be like him for we will see him as he is gathered together as his family. And in the Gospel, we have the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes, which is really a litany of what it means to be blessed. A blueprint for living the Christian life. It tells us how to become a saint. To be pure. To be poor in a spirit, which means to know that everything we have comes from God. To hunger and thirst for righteousness. To be meek. To be merciful. To be peacemakers. Even to be persecuted falsely, because of the Gospel.

We are used to seeing depictions of saints in stained glass, and wood, and marble, and plaster. Many of them, literally on pedestals. That can give us the wrong impression about saints. Today’s feast reminds us that we are called to become saints. 

Today’s feast is a summons, a challenge to every one of us. The Solemnity of All Saints is a kind of dare. A dare to be more. A dare to be a saint. Can you and I realistically hope to attain that sort of sanctity? The church’s short and resounding answer is yes, of course we can.

And here is a great truth about saints — they were just like us. They were just like us. Flesh and blood. Strength and weakness. They were people of appetites and longings, ambitions and disappointments, vanities and eccentricities. They were simple sinners like you and me. That’s how they started out, but by God’s grace that’s not how they ended up. They ended up becoming something more. 

Nobody is born a saint. Well maybe the blessed virgin Mary, you know, although she had to cooperate with God’s grace. The rest of us have to become saints over time. We have many examples to encourage us. 

We have the relics that are here as part of the Eucharistic Revival for our country.  We’ve had the chance, or you will have the chance after Mass as I did just before, to venerate these relics of Saint Manuel, a priest who died in 1940 in Spain. He was assigned as a young zealous priest to a parish, looking forward to having a lively family of faith, and he found the church to be neglected and full of cobwebs and dirt and the people and uncaring. He went into church and stared at the tabernacle and realized, of course, that there was someone staring back. The Lord, in his eucharistic presence. And he realized that he had everything he needed to grow in holiness and to be a good priest. He was known to say, “Here is Jesus,” pointing at the tabernacle. “He is here. Do not abandon him.” 

We’re veering off a little bit. We’ll get to blessed Carlo in a minute here. What about Dorothy Day? A very unlikely the candidate to become a saint but now the servant of God. She lived in our own country in the 1920s. She was an anarchist and communist from Brooklyn and worked as a journalist and spent many nights drinking with some of the leading writers of her time like Eugene O’Neil. She sadly had an abortion and a brief marriage, but then she was drawn to Christ, especially his presence in the Eucharist, and she underwent a deep conversion which led to a radical ministry to the poor which continues to our own day. And now she’s a candidate for sainthood.

Or centuries earlier Saint Augustine, the towering saint in the history of the church but a great sinner before he became a converted Christian. He partook of all the pleasures of the world – had a mistress, a child outside of marriage, followed all the popular trends of his time until his mother’s prayers and Saint Ambrose’s great preaching and example in Milan got him to stop and open his heart to God. And we know the rest of the story. 

And then back to our relics, Blessed Carlo Acutis. Born into a well-to-do, secular Italian family, parents who weren’t practicing their faith much, maybe Christmas and Easter. But their son Carlo, from a very young age was drawn to church and the Mass, and he kept bugging them to bring him to church. And after his first Communion remarkably for a boy of his age, he never missed daily Mass. He had a very typical life of school and soccer and video games, but his growing relationship with the Lord helped him to gain self-discipline and to grow holiness. His saying, his motto, is “the Eucharist is our highway to heaven.” 

In these four examples, and these are just four, I hope we realize that we have everything that they had to become a saint. We have the Lord and the Eucharist. We have the sacraments and the scriptures. We have confession. We have the example of holy men and women. We have everything they had to become saints right here at our cathedral parish and in every parish of the diocese. 

So do not dismiss the possibility of becoming a saint. You were made for this. The saints are closer to us than we may realize. They have struggled with sin and temptation. They have stumbled and fallen, but they always got up and started again, resolving to do better. To be better. To aim higher. 

The Solemnity of all the Saints challenges us to be more. To be great. It reminds us of our potential, the promise that lies with each of us. It is the promise that was fulfilled by the countless men and women we venerate on this day. They’re our models, our companions, our inspiration, our guide. Every one of us, by the grace of God, can become a saint.