Dear friends,
Today is the Solemnity of All Saints, and Pope Leo XIV preached on it from his window at the Angelus this morning.
This week’s reflection is a personal one, about an old Jesuit who taught me what this feast means years before I had an inkling what it meant.
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“See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are.” — 1 John 3:1
Between 2007 and 2011, I often went to daily 4:00 PM Mass at Bellarmine Chapel on Xavier University’s campus in Cincinnati. The priest at the altar was usually Fr. Al Bischoff, an old Cincinnati Jesuit whom everybody on campus, from the freshmen in Husman Hall to the president’s office, called Father B.
Those were hard years to be a young Catholic, and I’m not sure people who weren’t in the pews then remember how hard.
The abuse crisis had broken open in Boston in 2002, when I was in middle school, and in 2009 the Ryan and Murphy reports came out of Ireland with their own long, sickening record of children betrayed by men in collars. Plenty of my friends drifted away, and I understood why.
Some afternoons the student Mass was just the two of us: Father B at the altar and me in the pew.
He’d greet me, as he greeted everyone, with two words. “Hello, Saint.”
Man or woman, eighteen or eighty, it didn’t matter. Nobody at Xavier was exempt, and I suspect a few bewildered visiting parents got it too.
There are two stories about where the habit came from.
The less noble one happens to be true.
He started calling students “saint” back when he taught religion and English at Elder High School on Cincinnati’s west side because he couldn’t keep their names straight, and by the time he was in his nineties, he knew more people than any human memory could reasonably hold.
Who could blame him?
Fr. Michael Graham, the Jesuit who was Xavier’s president when I was there, told the other story after Father B died in June of last year, at 98, at the Jesuit community in Clarkston, Michigan.
In calling people saints, Graham wrote in his remembrance for the Midwest Jesuits, Al was “calling people to be who God made them to be.”
That’s Saint Paul, more or less. Paul opens Romans by greeting the Christians in that city as people “called to be holy” (the King James says “called to be saints”), and he tells the Philippians that “our citizenship is in heaven.”
For the record, Fr. Bischoff did know my name, and I never took that gift for granted.
On the hard days, though, “Saint” meant more to me than “Christopher.” My name comes from the Greek Christophoros, the Christ-bearer, and from the old legend of the man who carried a child across a river and found he was carrying Christ.
When Father B called me Saint, I heard all of that at once: who I was and who I was supposed to become, from a man who seemed to believe it about me on days when I didn’t measure up.
Today’s second reading says it better than I can. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed,” the First Letter of John says. Father B was greeting both halves of that sentence every time he opened his mouth.
Pope Leo XIV preached from his window above St. Peter’s Square during his the Angelus this morning. It’s worth reading at length:
Today, in fact, we celebrate all the saints: those whom the Church has recognized as such as well as the countless others who have not been formally recognized but are known to God.
As today’s Gospel reminds us, they are poor in spirit, yet rich in God’s love. Their faces are streaked with tears, yet they find consolation in prayer. They are meek in the face of violence and rewarded by the Father. They hunger for justice, yet are filled in the depths of their consciences. They are ready to forgive and embraced by mercy.
They are disarmed in heart, yet protected by God. They are peacemakers, called by name by God. They are persecuted and insulted, yet strong in faith and charity.
A little later he said, “Holiness is not a privilege reserved for a few, but a universal vocation that speaks to each of us where we live.” Then he gave the crowd what he called the feast’s hope-filled message: “God sees the good that we do not see, knows stories that we do not know and reaches hearts to which we have no access.”
I keep circling back to one of his phrases. Peacemakers, Leo said, are “called by name by God.”
In the narrow sense, today belongs to the canonized, the men and women with feast days and plaster statues in the side chapels. Leo XIV was careful to say it belongs to many more people than that.
Here’s what I mean.
