Saturday, October 31, 2020

Feast Of All Saints - 1 November

Quoted from Learn Religions [1]:

All Saints Day is a special feast day on which Catholics celebrate all the saints, known and unknown. While most saints have a particular feast day on the Catholic calendar (usually, though not always, the date of their death), not all of those feast days are observed. And saints who have not been canonized — those who are in Heaven, but whose sainthood is known only to God — have no particular feast day. In a special way, All Saints Day is their feast.

Quoted from CHURCH TIMES [2]:

The glory of the saints is the fruit of their contemplation. The Psalmist writes that we must “look upon [the Lord] and be radiant”. [3] Commenting on this verse, St[.] Thomas Aquinas writes that “God is light and the one who approaches the light will be illuminated.”

The earthly lives of the saints testify to an important spiritual reality. The closer human beings draw to God, the greater their awareness of their sinfulness is. As our Gospel reminds us, true sanctity involves poverty of spirit. It is utterly opposed to the self-congratulation of an “in-group” who know themselves to be especially worthy of esteem, or especially favoured by God. As they grow in virtue, the saints feel even more keenly both their imperfection and their total dependence on the Lord.

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“The reason that the world does not know us”, [Saint John the Apostle] writes, “is that it did not know him.” [4] The saints reveal to us a God whose character is quite different from our worldly fantasies of glory and dominion. The Beatitudes describe a series of qualities — poverty, meekness, undergoing persecution — which the world sees as signs of weakness and failure. Yet these are the qualities made manifest in Jesus’s earthly life, and in the lives of his saints.


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