Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Paul Center, Steubenville, Ohio
Deacon Conference on “Scripture, the Soul of Sacred Theology: The Gospel of Matthew”
All Saints Day 2025
November 1, 2025
Rev 7:2-4.9-14, Ps 24, 1 Jn 3:1-3, Mt 5:1-12
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.1.25_Homily_1.mp3
The following text guided the homily:
* Today on this great solemnity, we first celebrate the saints. We celebrate the great and famous saints we know about, like the holy deacons Saints Stephen, Philip, Lawrence, Ephrem, Francis of Assisi, Vincent of Zaragoza, Romanos, Alcuin, and Francis di Paola. We celebrate also the countless quiet saints, the “saints next door,” among whom we pray are numbered our deceased loved ones and those who passed on to us the gift of the faith, who died in the love of the Lord and now live in His love. The saints are the multitude who have “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,” as we heard in today’s first reading, and brought those white baptismal garments “unstained into the everlasting life of heaven,” like they were instructed to do on the day of their baptism. These are the “great multitude that no one could count, from every nation,” who have not just been called “children of God” through baptism, as St. John told us in today’s second reading, but have lived as children of God throughout their lives, seeking to love God with all their mind, heart, soul and strength and to love their neighbor as Christ loved them. They are the ones who, as we prayed in the Psalm, have longed to see God’s face, who, by God’s mercy, had sinless hands, pure hearts, and desires not for vain things but for the things of God. These are the ones who have ascended “the mountain of the Lord,” the eternal Jerusalem, and who “stand in his holy place.” These are the ones who are singing today in that holy place the beautiful endless song glimpsed in the passage from Revelation, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
* But All Saints Day is not just about celebrating those who have lived truly successful lives, who have received and responded to the love of God and made the eternal Hall of Fame. It’s also meant, in having us focus on them, to spur us to imitate them so that one day November 1 will in the future be our day, too. As the traditional American Gospel hymn intones, “O Lord, I want to be in that number when the saints go marching in.” St. John Paul II reminded us as we began the third Christian millennium that everything the Church does is meant to help us become holy, to help us respond to what the Second Vatican Council called the “universal call to holiness.” St. John Paul II wrote, “Since Baptism is a true entry into the holiness of God through incorporation into Christ and the indwelling of his Spirit, it would be a contradiction to settle for a life of mediocrity, marked by a minimalist ethic and a shallow religiosity. To ask catechumens: ‘Do you wish to receive Baptism?’ means at the same time to ask them: ‘Do you wish to become holy?’ It means to set before them the radical nature of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Mt5:48).” He continued, “This ideal of perfection must not be misunderstood as if it involved some kind of extraordinary existence, possible only for a few ‘uncommon heroes’ of holiness. … The time has come to re-propose wholeheartedly to everyone this high standard of ordinary Christian living: the whole life of the Christian community … must lead in this direction.” On All Saints Day each year the Church indeed reproposes wholeheartedly this high standard of the Christian life, that God calls us not to mediocrity, or minimalism,
