Homily for All Saints Day (2026)

“Who are these, clothed in white robes, and whence have they come?”

“Sir, you know.”

“These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

It’s possible that, by the “great tribulation,” John refers here to the Neronian persecution in the middle of the first century. Though many Christians today prefer to think of this as some kind of future apocalyptic event. Whatever it is, historically, the meaning for us is actually quite straightforward: the saints are those who have been purged, in one way or another, through some kind of ordeal. They have been tried in the fire, as the Book of Wisdom has it.

That sounds a lot like Purgatory. And that’s because it is. Purgatory is not some permanent neighborhood of the afterlife; it is rather the state of those on their way to glory. The saints gathered around the throne of God are those who have come through that purging fire, who have been made fully and wholly clean.

We know who some of them are. We name the apostles and martyrs of the Roman canon at every mass; we name others on days all throughout the year. And many of those saints are the ones who went through that experience of purgatory in this life. That is part of how we know they are in heaven, because they were proved and tested before our very eyes. But there are no doubt many whom we do not know, whose purgation may have been long or short, but who in the end are in the same place. There are, to be sure, different places in that company, and not all have the exact same glory. No one can compare, for example, with our Lady — higher than the cherubim, more glorious than the seraphim (as the hymns often describe her). But to stand in her light is not to feel diminished but to feel expanded, because what child would not feel delight and a holy pride in his mother’s beauty? And even for the others, in this company the glory of one is the greater glory of all.

I love what St. Bernard of Clairvaux says about the assembly of the saints in a traditional office reading for today: “Why should our praise and glorification, or even the celebration of this feast day mean anything to the saints? What do they care about earthly honours when their heavenly Father honours them by fulfilling the faithful promise of the Son? What does our commendation mean to them? The saints have no need of honour from us; neither does our devotion add the slightest thing to what is theirs. Clearly, if we venerate their memory, it serves us, not them. But I tell you, when I think of them, I feel myself inflamed by a tremendous yearning.”

Another answer to St. Bernard’s question is this: the saints do not need us to remember them; indeed they are already in glory and lack nothing. But that does not mean that our remembering them and invoking them and celebrating them is not itself a further cause of joy. The life of glory is, after all, I submit, not a life of bare necessity but of grace and overflowing abundance.

But St. Bernard is also quite right in this: even while in one sense our commemoration is totally unnecessary and gratuitous, in another way it is useful and even necessary for us. How, exactly? So that “we should aim at attaining this glory with a wholehearted and prudent desire.”

We should aim to ourselves be tried in the fire. We should submit ourselves to the disciplines of purgatory sooner rather than later.

And what does that entail? Our gospel gives us a pretty good sense of it: the beatitudes are nothing more and nothing less than an explanation of the life of virtue, which is to say, the life of holy character. The “blessed” are not simply those who avoided sin or who checked off the right boxes to not go to hell; nor are they simply those who underwent some magical quantity of suffering that somehow earned them rights: they are those who are being transformed into saints. In other words, sainthood — the kind of sainthood that emerges from purgatory — is no mere external goodness, like the person who says and does all the right things but for the wrong reasons or without really wanting to do the good. Virtue, or character, means a total integrity between our desires, our affections, and our actions. Jesus doesn’t say “blessed are those who satisfy the precepts of the Church;” he says blessed are the meek, the merciful, the pure of heart. And the point is not that there is some kind of opposition between virtue and law, simply that virtue is the habit of law; it is being so totally formed in the good that it is indistinguishable from who we are.

So if we yearn for the beauty and the glory and the fellowship of the saints in light, our first job is to get to work in imitating them. But we have help. Their help, in fact. Again, St Bernard: “That we may rightly hope and strive for such blessedness, we must above all seek the prayers of the saints. Thus, what is beyond our own powers to obtain will be granted through their intercession.” Which is, we might say again, a totally gratuitous and unnecessary economy. Some of our Protestant brethren may ask, not wrongly, why can’t God save us on our own without all of this saintly help? To which we must respond: surely he could, but why would we want him to? Why would we want to seek heaven all alone? This God is so powerful, so transcendent, that he is not at all threatened by sharing his work with creatures, by shining his light in and through them.

Do you want to be a saint? I hope so. The saints hope so too, and with their help, in the riches of God’s grace, you can be.