Homily for the Solemnity of All Saints

November 1, 2026
Casa Santa Maria
Rome, Italy

Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14
Psalm 24:1bc-2, 3-4ab, 5-6
1st John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12a

This past Thursday morning Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Education Policy released the results of a study that was sponsored by Thomas Aquinas College. The report compared SAT forms from 1980 and 1987 with the most recent SAT practice test. The report shows extensive changes to the SAT reading section over the past four decades, most of which lessens the emphasis upon students’ ability to read and analyze difficult texts.

These variations include:

• Shorter passages, less than a third of their former length.
• A sharp drop in the number of vocabulary questions requiring independent word knowledge, from 60 per test to 10.
• The near elimination of argumentative and persuasive readings from the test, replaced by expository texts.
• Replacing reading passages that assumed prior knowledge and understanding on the part of the reader with texts that reveal their meanings through contextual clues.
  

“This shift is significant because reading, vocabulary, and comprehension are mutually reinforcing,” the study’s authors observe. “As students read more, both the breadth (number of words known) and the depth (quality of word understanding) of their vocabulary increase, which in turn supports stronger reading comprehension.”

An administrative official of Thomas Aquinas College remarked, “The SAT’s changes reduce reading and writing to the simple gathering and presenting of data, devoid of argument, emotion, or deeper meaning. At a time when machines are becoming the standard of intelligence, we risk relegating human intelligence to little more than another computing device.” It is deceptive.

Just as many in academia have changed the measurement of what is required for a sound education in a university setting, changes that have resulted in the practice of high school teachers “teaching to the test” and not directed to the education of students in a formative manner, there are too many responsible for faith formation in the Church that are trying to do a similar thing in morality and spirituality. The Narrow Gate to Heaven is as narrow as it has always been and cannot change because God cannot deceive nor be deceived.

We know that the narrow gate is not an impossible standard because of the great multitude described in our first reading from the Book of Revelation. The Beatitudes are progressive measurements for the narrow gate, measurements of holiness that are fixed in the New Law as presented by Christ Himself in His Sermon on the Mount. They are not measurements of compliance to a test. They are measurements of the integral growth in sanctity that involves dying to oneself. Their name conveys what life among the saints in heaven is like. As priests, teachers, and evangelizers, we cannot teach to this test be reducing spiritual formation to abstractions, we can only live the test by loving God and our neighbor in the present moment with His Grace. The Beatitudes are not measurements of the fad of the “now” in contemporary society.

The poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, once observed: “The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”  But for a saint to have a past and a sinner to have a future, each must have a “present.” The now is an atomized unit of time without reference to the past or to the future. It is puncti-linear. What we call the now is unintelligible because it stands alone. But, unlike the “now” the present is extended time — it is essentially related to the past and to the future — individually, communally, and teleologically — and ultimately eternal. Pain without reflection compels us into the “now” without reason or hope, simply sensations and emotions: but the present opens for us the path to healing and redemption through the mystery of redemptive suffering and love, where we consider the past in light of God’s mercy and entrust the future to His Providence. To that end — pain too frequently acts as a catalyst for sin, the human temptation is to take the first selfish off ramp to numb the pain — pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Pain drives us to the immediacy of the “now”, sin locks us into the now, but we encounter Grace in the present.

The good news is that this is precisely where the Beatitudes enter the picture. As the late Dominican priest and theologian Father Servais Pinckaers observed, “To satisfy our appetite for riches, the beatitudes suggest poverty. In place of our aggressiveness, they would have us be meek. They would slake our thirst for pleasure with patience and love of justice, and turn our hard-heartedness into mercy, our inclination to evil into purity of heart and our touchiness to a peaceful spirit, while our vanity would be transformed into a carefree acceptance of insults and calumny. The Beatitudes seem to delight in promising us happiness in all that we loathe and fear.”

Love is at the heart of this difference between the “present” and the “now.” It is grace and repentance in the present moment. At some point in a saint’s life — those several thousand proclaimed by formal canonization and those myriads upon myriads known to God alone and to be revealed to us in the Kingdom — a saint accepts God’s love and begins to know God through Christ and comes to care about Him present in others. The saints, all of us, through Grace can decide to be converted from sin and move from asking the question more terrifying than any SAT question, “Will I be punished?” to asking the saintly question with mature freedom, “How can I return your love, O God?”

We should not let the darkness of our sins obscure our lives from the friendship that Christ offers us in the present moment. Eternal life begins in the present through the selflessness of love beginning with acceptance of God’s mercy for the sins of our past and culminating in the future in our destiny of the beatitude of heaven.

Pope Francis gave us the metaphor of the Church as a field hospital. This compelling metaphor requires deeper reflection. As priests, we are ministers of healing and redemption. The field hospital requires us to accompany the patients from the unintelligible “now” of pain into the purposefulness of redemptive suffering received as a grace in the present moment. We do this by listening compassionately to those wounded by sin. We do this by guiding the patients of the field hospital in consideration of their past as an examination of their conscience, how they became sick and wounded. It requires a diagnosis made with the empathy of a pastor and not with the distant eye of a technician. We cannot change the measurements set by Christ to contemporary trends by calling the unnatural “natural” and sin a “sacrament.”

As clerics, we are meant to continue the priestly ministry of Christ Himself. Our ministry is true only to the degree that it conforms to the meaning and standards of Christ Himself. Christ has anointed us to help His people attain holiness as He defines it — holiness such that we may see His face and live. As clerics, we must first drink deeply from the chalice first offered to James and John that we offer to others. We are called to die to selfishness, illusion, addiction, and idolatry. We must rise to new life in Christ. Then we can be credible witnesses, authoritative teachers, and ministers of the Sacred Mysteries, that we ourselves receive according to the mind and heart of Christ, and not our own.