The French novelist Léon Bloy, writes: “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” This is the unwavering call that the Church makes to all people throughout the ages. It comes from Jesus himself, who ends his most important and longest of teachings, The Sermon on the Mount, with the call to His disciples: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” [Mt 5:48]. 

 

Through his Paschal Mystery – his suffering, death, resurrection and ascension – Jesus gives us the grace to be perfect through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Most particularly, he gives it for those of us who are consecrated to his service. As Cardinal Basil Hume once said, our people are right to expect their bishops and their priests to be holy. They know, by a very sure instinct, that we are concerned with sacred things. We stand every day at the altar and use a form of words that identifies us in a remarkable way with the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Ours is an awesome responsibility. 

 

In the centuries that followed the summons of Jesus, the Fathers of the Church repeatedly called Christians to holiness, as did the Councils of the Church. In its “Universal Call to Holiness in the Church” – chapter five of the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium) – the Second Vatican Council states:

All the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity. In order to reach this perfection, the faithful should use the strength dealt out to them by Christ’s gift, so that doing the will of the Father in everything, they may wholeheartedly devote themselves to the glory of God and to the service of their neighbour. [n.40 §2]

 

St John Paul II, who as pope raised to the altars more saints than any of his predecessors, refers to holiness as “the prime and fundamental vocation” that God the Father assigns to each of us: “Holiness is the greatest testimony of the dignity conferred on a disciple of Christ” [Christifideles Laici, n.16]. When in September 2010 Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI spoke to young people here in London on the steps of Westminster Cathedral, dedicated to the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, he told them exactly what holiness consists of.

 

Think of all the love that your heart was made to receive, and also the love it is meant to give. After all, we were made for love. This is what the Bible means when it says that we were made in the image and likeness of God; we were made to know the God of love, the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and find our supreme fulfillment in that divine love. We were made to receive love. We were also made to give love, to make it the inspiration for all we do, and the most enduring thing in our lives. 

 

In our own times, Pope Francis has offered compelling words on the call to holiness in his Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate, dedicated entirely to the theme of holiness in today’s world: “The Lord asks everything of us, and in return he offers us true life, the happiness for which we were created. He wants us to be saints and not to settle for a bland and mediocre existence.”

 

From the teaching of Jesus onwards, the message is clear: we are called to be saints. Countless holy persons over the ages have attested to this. “God would never inspire me with desires that cannot be realized,” St Thérèse of Lisieux writes, “so in spite of my littleness, I can hope to be a saint.” But, looking at ourselves – our weaknesses, failures and sins – we might well ask, how? Today’s Solemnity of All Saints, the readings of the Mass, and this most beautiful of churches, dedicated to the Body of Christ, offer us the answer.

 

In the stained-glass window of the Sacred Heart Chapel here at Corpus Christi – the Westminster diocesan Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament – we see St Margaret Mary Alacoque. In his apparitions to this seventeenth-century Visitation Sister, Jesus spoke of his Eucharistic presence as the “Sacrament of Charity,” such that St Margaret Mary could affirm the: “Jesus is found in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, in which love keeps him tied like a victim, always ready to be sacrificed for the glory of his Father, and for our salvation.”

 

Indeed, in the Eucharist God becomes body given out and blood poured out in Christ in such a way that we who receive him worthily are given the grace to enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving love. In today’s second reading, we hear what our nature truly is: “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called children of God. So we are!” The one who accepts that “God loved us first” answers with the gift of love: “We love because He first loved us” [1 Jn4.19]. 

 

Such love becomes visible in the men and women who reflect God’s presence in the world through their own self-giving love. These are the martyrs, so many of whom fecundated this nation with their blood in defence of the Catholic faith and the Eucharist, “washing their robes in the blood of the Lamb”. They are the saints. So many of them fill this Shrine: St Joseph, St. Clare, St Jean Vianney, St. Mary Magdalene – to name just a few. The martyrs and saints allow themselves to be taken up in this primordial initiative of God and witness to charity as a giving of self, that is, in love of God, neighbour and even of one’s enemies. 

 

St Thérèse of Lisieux is one of the many saints whose statues adorn this Shrine. As she reached the end of her short life of just 24 years, she addressed God like this: “Your will is to love in me all those that you command me to love! Yes, I can feel it – when I am charitable, it is only Jesus acting in me; the more I am bound to him, the more I love my sisters.” In times so heavily clouded by “darkness and the shadow of death” [Luke 1.79] – attacks on life from the womb to the disabled and elderly, the merciless ending of life through euthanasia, the disintegration of the family through divorce and gender ideology, war and barbaric violence – how much we need saints, who experience God’s love and allow his self-giving love to the end to enter this world as light!

 

 

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ: let us dare to be saints who live and draw grace from the Eucharist. Just a few weeks ago this church dedicated a shrine to Blessed Carlo Acutis. “The only thing we have to ask God for in prayer,” he would say, “is the desire to be holy.” He knew that the “highway” to holiness was the Eucharist. ““The more we receive the Eucharist, the more we will become like Jesus, so that on this earth we will have a foretaste of Heaven.” 

 

What is Heaven if not living with Jesus in the joy of the Trinity and in the company of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Angels and the Saints? In communion with them on this Solemnity of All Saints and in this church – this hidden gem consecrated to the honour of the Blessed Sacrament – we prostrate ourselves before the throne, worship God, and exclaim: “Blessing and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving, power, and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen.”