Let us be in that number when all the saints go marching in

My friends in Christ,

Today we celebrate the great feast of All Saints Day. We remember those holy men and women who have gone before and are now in heaven. Together with All Souls Day tomorrow, these days give a snapshot of the entirety of the Church. Those of us here on earth, who are working towards salvation that was won for us by Christ’s death on the cross are a part of the Church Militant. Those souls who are undergoing purification before entering heaven in Purgatory are the Church Suffering. And finally all the saints, both those formally canonized by the Church and those who are not, are the Church Triumphant. They are enjoying being in the presence of God in Heaven. Today we celebrate them, and look to them for example of how to live holy lives. All of us, everyone in this church this morning, are called to be saints. We are all called to be with God in heaven. 

Today’s Gospel from Saint Matthew comes from the Sermon on the Mount. This discourse sets out how we are to live as Christians, indeed it is a manual for how to be a saint. Just as Moses went up to a mountain to receive the Ten Commandments and the law of the Old Testament, Jesus gives his sermon on top of a mountain. I was lucky to visit this spot, now known as Mount of Beatitudes during my Holy Land Pilgrimage at the beginning of this year. We stayed right on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and you could see this giant mountain just a few miles off in the distance. Lucky for us, we took a bus there instead of walking up like those who heard Jesus did. It is fitting that Jesus gave this great sermon on a mountain because he is the new Moses. He took what Moses had given us and raised it to a new level. The Beatitudes that we hear today can be a bit confusing for us to understand. The word blessed can also be translated as happy or lucky, so we read blessed are the poor in spirit as happy are those who are not attached to material possessions. And blessed are those who mourn as lucky are those who are not addicted to good feelings because sometimes doing the will of God involves pain and suffering, as we have seen in the examples of the martyrs. We see in the beatitudes the more we focus on God and others, and the less on ourselves, the closer we will be to becoming the future saints of the Church. For as Christ said: “your reward will be great in heaven.”

Now I know most of us do not think of ourselves as future saints. When we think of a saint we think of someone such as Saint Joseph, the husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary; Saint Dominic, the founder of the Order of Preachers; someone like Saint Padre Pio who suffered stigmata and was able to bilocate, or even in more modern times those such as Saint Mother Teresa or Saint John Paul II. People who were so devout and so holy we could never be like them. Well I want to introduce you to one of the newest blesseds (that is someone in the process of canonization who is currently just one step below official sainthood). This person was born in 1991, he played video games, watched pokemon, and loved soccer. He was skilled with computers and made his own website which catalogued eucharistic miracles. Blessed Carlo Acutis, who was beatified just 3 weeks ago, was in many ways an ordinary teenager. If he had lived on the northwest side of Chicago he could have attended Saint Patrick High School with me. Sadly he died of leukemia in 2006 at the age of 15. But he lived his short life dedicated to Christ. The miracle that led to Blessed Carlo’s beatification was that of a boy in Brazil who was born with a birth defect that did not allow him to eat normal food. When he was 4 years old he only weighed 20 pounds and was constantly in pain. He was not given long to live. His mother prayed to Blessed Carlo for his intercession and her son was completely cured of his condition. 

My Friends remember the old saying, “a saint is a sinner who keeps trying.” None of us are perfect, we are all sinners. But everyone here can be the next Blessed Carlo. We need to take the sermon on the mount as our handbook. We need to make sure we follow the commandments, pray, fast, and go to confession. If we do these things, and keep on trying after the times that we fail, we will be in that number when all the saints go marching in.