Reflection: All Saints' Day 2025

Reflection on the Readings for All Saints’ Day (Year C)

First Reading: Revelation 7:2–4, 9–14  

John’s vision bursts open the veil between earth and heaven. An angel seals 144,000 from Israel—symbolic completeness (12 × 12 × 1,000)—yet the camera immediately pans wider: “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language.” These are the baptized who have “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” The image is stark: sainthood is not a private achievement but a corporate identity forged in the crucible of earthly trial and sealed by the Paschal mystery. On All Saints’ Day we do not merely remember the canonized; we glimpse the entire Church Triumphant, the “cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1) who have already crossed the finish line.

Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 24  

“Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord?” Only those with “clean hands and pure hearts.” The psalmist’s question is answered in the first reading: the multitude made clean not by moral perfection alone, but by the Lamb’s blood. The antiphon—“Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face”—is the heartbeat of the feast. The saints are not distant superheroes; they are the preview of what every baptized person is called to become.

Second Reading: 1 John 3:1–3  

“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” John refuses to let us sentimentalize sainthood. The world “does not know us” because it “did not know him.” Yet the promise is audacious: “We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” The saints are not a separate species; they are the future of the human race, the first installment of the new creation. All Saints’ Day is therefore eschatological: it drags eternity into the present and says, “This is where history is headed.”

Gospel: Matthew 5:1–12a (The Beatitudes)  

Jesus does not offer a moral checklist but a portrait of the Kingdom. Poor in spirit, meek, merciful, persecuted—these are not virtues to be cultivated in isolation but the very shape of Christ’s own life. The saints are beatitudinal people: they have allowed the Sermon on the Mount to become flesh in them. Every canonized saint—Francis in his poverty, Thérèse in her hiddenness, Maximilian Kolbe in his self-gift—simply incarnates one or more of the beatitudes. The feast invites us to ask: Which beatitude is still un-lived in me?

 A Brief History of the Solemnity

The roots of All Saints’ Day reach back to the early Church’s dies natalis—the “birthday into heaven” of martyrs. By the 4th century, local churches kept calendars of these feasts. The Pantheon in Rome, rededicated in 609 (or 613) by Pope Boniface IV as Sancta Maria ad Martyres, became the catalyst for a universal feast. Pope Gregory III (731–741) moved the celebration to November 1 and expanded it to all saints, not just martyrs. Gregory IV (827–844) made it obligatory throughout the Carolingian Empire, cementing November 1 in the Latin rite. The date may also echo the Celtic Samhain, but the theological content is purely Christian: the triumph of the baptized over death.

 Apologetics: Why Catholics Pray to Saints

1. They Can Hear Us  

   - Scriptural warrant: Hebrews 12:1 describes the saints as a “great cloud of witnesses” (Greek nephos marturōn) surrounding us. The image is athletic: spectators in the stands who see the race. Revelation 5:8 and 8:3–4 depict the elders and angels presenting “the prayers of the saints” as incense before the throne. If the heavenly court can receive our prayers, finite limitations of space and time no longer bind them.  

   - Theological principle: The resurrection transforms human nature. The saints are “alive in Christ” (Rom 6:8) and participate in the omniscience of God by grace, not by nature. Just as Moses and Elijah converse with Jesus at the Transfiguration (Matt 17:3), the saints are not “dead” but more alive.

2. They Intercede for Us  

   - Biblical precedent: In Revelation 5:8 the elders offer the prayers of the saints to God. The verb prospherō is sacrificial language—intercession is a priestly act.  

   - Analogy of the Body: 1 Corinthians 12:12–27 insists that death does not sever membership in Christ’s Body. “If one member suffers, all suffer; if one is honored, all rejoice.” Intercession is simply the charity of the Body extended beyond the veil.

3. We Do Not Worship Them  

   - Latria vs. Dulia: Catholic theology distinguishes latria (worship due to God alone) from dulia (veneration owed to saints) and hyperdulia (higher veneration for Mary). The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and Trent (Session 25) formalized this.  

   - Lex orandi, lex credendi: The Collect for All Saints’ Day prays through the saints to the Father, never to them as ultimate end. Veneration is relative—it terminates in God, who crowns his own gifts in the saints (CCC 2683).

4. Objection: “Call no one Father” / “One Mediator”  

   - 1 Timothy 2:5 (“one mediator”) refers to redemption, not intercession. The same Paul asks others to pray for him (Rom 15:30; Col 4:3). If human intercession does not contradict Christ’s mediatorship, neither does heavenly intercession.  

   - Matthew 23:9 is hyperbolic polemic against Pharisaic pride, not a ban on titles. Paul calls himself “father” (1 Cor 4:15).

 Conclusion: The Communion of Saints as Eschatological Reality

All Saints’ Day is not a roll call of the perfect but a family reunion of the redeemed. The readings converge on one truth: the Church is one Body across time and eternity. To pray to the saints is to lean into the grain of the universe, where love is stronger than death and the victory of the Lamb has already begun. The beatitudes are not a distant ideal but the present tense of the Kingdom, lived out in the saints and offered to us. Today, the Church Militant looks up and says, “If they can become what they now are, so can we—by the same Blood, the same Spirit, the same Eucharist.”  

Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus—and bring your saints with you.