1 & 2 November 2025, SOLEMNITY OF ALL SAINTS
Today’s feast of All Saints opens before us one of the most beautiful visions in Scripture: “a great multitude which no one could number, from every nation, race, people and tongue, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” The Book of Revelation doesn’t present the saints as a distant elite. They are people, countless, ordinary, recognisable, very much like us, who have passed through what the reading calls “the great tribulation” of human life and have been made new, radiant, alive in God.
On this feast of All Saints, we are considering the many Christians who, in addition to those whom the Church has formally recognized as saints, have lived lives of faithfulness and closeness to Christ and now enjoy the glory of heaven. And, therefore, it is also clearly about our own destiny. God invites us to this as well. He wants our holiness. He wants our lives to be redeemed lives shining with his glory. The saints are not exceptions to the Christian life; they are the meaning of it. This is the life we are called to share. We are called to holiness; our primary vocation is to be saints.
And this is precisely what St John tells us today in the second reading: “See what love the Father has lavished upon us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” We are not aspiring to something alien to us. Holiness is simply becoming what we already are: children of God, learning to resemble our Father.
And into this great feast the Church this year has given us a gift full of joy: St John Henry Newman has been declared a Doctor of the Church yesterday morning by Pope Leo XIV, a teacher for all ages, and co-patron of Catholic education, alongside St Thomas Aquinas.
For us, this is not a distant announcement made in Rome. We feel it here, in this parish of the Oratory where Newman’s spirit is part of the walls, part of the rhythm of prayer, part of the way we think and love and speak of Christ. Newman is not only the saint of scholars, theologians, and university students; he is the saint of each Christian heart seeking holiness in the ordinary and the everyday.
And today, the Gospel gives us the pattern of holiness: the Beatitudes. This beautiful passage of Scripture comes at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) in which Jesus lays out the most coherent blueprint of what it means to be his disciple, and the Beatitudes open this sermon with this image of mercy, peacefulness, and righteousness.
The Beatitudes are a portrait of Jesus Himself, and, therefore, a portrait of what holiness looks like in a human life. Holiness does not begin with achievement; it begins with desire: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Holiness is not glamour; it is poverty of spirit, meekness, mercy, purity of heart. It is living a life the world may not understand. And that is why the saints are signs of contradiction in every age. They have taken seriously that they are God’s children, and so they have come to resemble Him.
Newman understood this. He saw that the real battle of the Christian life is not waged in grand gestures but in the secret places of the heart. And he knew that holiness is not something dramatic. It is usually quiet, hidden, and steady. In a short instruction he once gave to the Oratorians of Birmingham, he said this:
“If you ask me what you are to do in order to be perfect, I say, first, do not lie in bed beyond the due time of rising; give your first thoughts to God; make a good visit to the Blessed Sacrament; inspect yourself daily; eat and drink to God’s glory; say the Angelus devoutly; say the Rosary well; be recollected; keep out bad thoughts; make your evening meditation well; examine yourself daily; go to bed in good time. And you are already perfect.”
What is remarkable about this description is how utterly ordinary this is. No heroic feats. No grand self-reinvention. Just faithfulness; the heart quietly turned toward God in the rhythms of daily life. Newman is reminding us: holiness is possible. Not later, when life is calmer. Not when we are wiser, or stronger, or more put-together, or have more time. But today, exactly as we are. The saints we celebrate are not people who found more time or better circumstances. They allowed Christ to meet them in the everyday fabric of their lives. Holiness begins with small, steady acts of love, and so it grows.
And this is what St John means when he says: “When he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” Holiness is not self-improvement. It is becoming like Christ by knowing Him, by looking toward Him, by letting Him shape the heart.
And so the saints today are not offering only comfort as companions to us on our Christian journey; they are also presenting a challenge. The question the feast asks us is: Do I actually want to be holy? Not respectable. Not vaguely good. Holy. Which is to say: like Christ.
Newman teaches us that holiness begins in the heart, where heart speaks to heart, Cor ad cor loquitur. Holiness is born when I allow Christ to speak to me intimately: not to the public version of myself, not to the mask, but to the real self, known to God. The person God sees in the private spaces of prayer, the one who, in the confessional, has all worldly pretense stripped away and can allow grace to enter freely. Newman believed with absolute conviction that God calls each person personally and uniquely to holiness. “God has created me to do Him some definite service,” he wrote. Not someone else. Me. You.
And so, it is fitting that Newman is now named co-patron of Catholic education. For him, education was never about producing useful citizens, impressive professionals, or clever debaters. True Catholic education forms saints. Men and women who see with the eyes of Christ, love with the heart of Christ, and act with the freedom of the children of God. Education, Newman said, is the drawing out of the soul into the fullness of truth.
So what does today ask of us, here? It asks us to allow our homes, our work, our friendships, our conversations, to become the places where Christ forms a saint’s heart. St Philip and Newman both believed deeply that holiness flourishes in ordinary human affections, in friendship, in shared meals, in laughter, in belonging. The Oratory is a school of heart to heart conversation with Christ, and with one another. Every time we make space for another person, every time we offer mercy, patience, gentleness, every time we choose truth over convenience, we are becoming the people Christ describes in the Beatitudes. The saints in the vision of Revelation are not impressive by the world’s standards. They simply clung to Christ. They endured and they kept the faith. They allowed their lives to be shaped by love, the pattern of love which they learn from Jesus in the Gospels.
Today, we ask for the grace to desire holiness again, consciously and actively. To desire to live as children of the Father. Not as theory. Not as decoration. But as the deep orientation of our lives. It means consecrating each day in our morning prayers to God and deciding, over and over again, to choose Christlike actions in the day to come. May St John Henry pray for us that our minds may seek truth without fear, that our hearts may listen when Christ speaks, that our lives may shine quietly with the joy of the Gospel. And one day, God willing, we too will stand among that great multitude no one can number, clothed in white, and we will recognise that holiness was not far from us. It was here, in the small faithful steps of every day.
May Christ make of us saints. Amen.