A homily for All Saints' Day

+ “Venite ad me, omnes qui laboratis, et onerati estis : et ego reficiam vos.” Come to me all ye who labour and are burdened; I will give you rest. (Mt 11:28)
 
These words – sung by the Church in the Alleluia verse before the Gospel today – appositely express the realities which are ours at this time. At the end of a week that has seen three Catholics violently martyred in a church a little more than a hundred kilometres from us, and in which the country has been put into another lockdown, our burdens are not small. Rightly to we come to worship Christ in this Mass (Whilst we still can!) to seek refreshment and restoration, for the days and weeks ahead may well be quite laboursome.
 
Today’s solemnity of All Saints itself should give us great encouragement. The countless men and women over the centuries who have felt oppressed by the burdens of their day – as we do by ours – but who have nevertheless persevered in fidelity to and hope in Jesus Christ and His one, true Church, call us by their witness, indeed in many cases by their very blood, to keep working out our salvation, to carry the burden of the day until its end.
 
Let us not forget that this salvation is the salvation of the soul, not of the body. Bodily health is a good, certainly, and rightly we seek to maintain it so that we can shoulder the God-given responsibilities that our ours in this life. But bodily health is not the ultimate good: a truth that many governments fail to understand in these peculiar times. The supreme good is the salvation of the soul. That is why the saints have endured all manner of physical and psychological suffering and oppression in the sure hope of that blessedness, of that righteousness in the sight of God, of which the Gospel of this Holy Mass speaks (Mt 5:1-12). As should we.
 
In all of this we are not alone. By virtue of our baptism we are a part of the Communion of Saints: of that great family of all the baptised, living and dead, in heaven and on earth. And in this great union those who have gone before us can assist us with their prayers and intercession. Let is not neglect to pray to them – in particular to our patron saints, especially our monastic ones – and to ask them for the graces we need in the particular circumstances of our day.
 
For the saints we celebrate today have persevered until the end and now stand before the throne of Lamb signing His praises as we read in the Epistle (Apoc 7:2-12). That, by their intercession, we also shall receive the grace of perseverance and come to share in their blessedness, let us entreat Almighty God at this altar this morning. +