Homily for the Solemnity of All Saints

In his award-winning novel, The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene tells the story of a ‘whiskey priest’ during the 1930’s Mexican Revolution, a war that attempted to completely destroy the Church in Mexico.

This all-to-human priest is an alcoholic and has fathered a child, but he refuses to abandon his people and he moves from village to village, secretly providing the Sacraments to the faithful while the authorities hunt him down.

Eventually, he is betrayed and captured. In his prison cell on the morning of his execution, he examines his life and death . . . Greene narrates the scene in these words:

“He felt only an immense disappointment because he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at that moment, that it could have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now at the end there was only one thing that counted – to be a saint.”

Throughout the liturgical year, the Church celebrates the lives and deaths of our fellow Christians who so perfectly imitated Christ in this life that they now reign with Him in the everlasting life of Heaven. And every year the Church sets aside this Feast of All Saints to celebrate the collective witness, not only of the saints whose names and stories we know, but those many others whose names and stories are known to God alone.


In proposing these great men and women to us for emulation and intercession, the Church is attempting to bring us to the same realization that Graham Green’s ‘whiskey priest’ came to at the end of his life: at the end, there is only one thing that counts: to be a saint.

In this sense, the Feast of All Saints is our feast day as well. It is the day when we remember and celebrate what we are created and called to be: “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are.”

By the way they lived their lives, by the things they said and wrote, by the acts of charity they performed the saints show us what a life looks like when it has been completely re-shaped by knowledge of the fact that we are indeed children of God. In practical terms, the saints show us how to live the Beatitudes, which Pope Benedict has called Jesus’ self-portrait. They show us how to be meek and humble and merciful, how to hunger and thirst for righteousness, how to be clean of heart and make peace. The saints show us how to be more like Jesus.

Celebrating and emulating the lives of the saints reminds us that in the end, all that really counts is to be a saint . . . and to be a saint does not require great accomplishments or achievements, it requires just a little self-restraint, a little courage, small but daily decisions to think and act with the heart and mind of Jesus.

Without giving too much of the novel away, let me just say that be the end of the story Greene gives us reason to believe that perhaps the whiskey-priest didn't go to God empty handed after all.  Maybe, just maybe, despite all his brokenness and sinfulness he had indeed cared enough about the one thing that really matters.

May Our Lady, Queen of All Saints, St. Joseph, the Apostles, the Martyrs and the entire “cloud of witnesses” intercede for us and inspire us to live and die like they did, so that we may also reign with them in Heaven.