Pope Francis on the Saints Next Door

 

Written by WPI Contributor

The Church celebrates the Solemnity of All Saints on Sunday, November 1, and the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed on Monday, November 2. In Gaudete et Exsultate, his 2018 apostolic exhortation on the call to holiness in today’s world, Pope Francis wrote of a holiness found not only on the liturgical calendar, but in the ordinary people living beside us.

Nor need we think only of those already beatified and canonized. The Holy Spirit bestows holiness in abundance among God’s holy and faithful people, for “it has pleased God to make men and women holy and to save them, not as individuals without any bond between them, but rather as a people who might acknowledge him in truth and serve him in holiness”. In salvation history, the Lord saved one people. We are never completely ourselves unless we belong to a people. That is why no one is saved alone, as an isolated individual. Rather, God draws us to himself, taking into account the complex fabric of interpersonal relationships present in a human community. God wanted to enter into the life and history of a people.

I like to contemplate the holiness present in the patience of God’s people: in those parents who raise their children with immense love, in those men and women who work hard to support their families, in the sick, in elderly religious who never lose their smile. In their daily perseverance I see the holiness of the Church militant. Very often it is a holiness found in our next-door neighbours, those who, living in our midst, reflect God’s presence. We might call them “the middle class of holiness”.

— Pope Francis, Gaudete et Exsultate, nos. 6–7, March 19, 2018