The Saints I

In the last several weeks I have been settling into my new home at St. Anthony's, Elizabeth, NJ, and have been made to feel very welcome. For this I am most grateful.

As I look at our beautiful church building I see all the statues that we have, and the great devotion that our community has to the various Saints represented by them. It is a reminder to me of when I was a boy and my grandmother brought me with her to daily Mass. After the Eucharist was over she would go to the special room that the small church had, filled with statues of St. Lucy, St. Rocco, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, among others crowded into the cramped space. Most of all I remember the look of love and trust on my grandmothers face as she kneeled, asking the help of her heavenly protectors.

I see this look now in the faces of our people who put their trust in the Saints. The Saints are a gift to us, and we should value their presence in our lives. They pray for us and give us their example of heroic virtue to follow. The Saints are alive and active within the Church. They are a sign for us that the communion of persons we call the Church is greater than what we can see. As The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us "We believe in the communion of all the faithful of Christ, those who are pilgrims on earth, the dead who are being purified, and the blessed in heaven, all together forming one Church; and we believe that in this communion, the merciful love of God and his saints is always [attentive] to our prayers." (962) The Church then is a reality of earth, purgatory and heaven! What a profound mystery we proclaim when we profess our belief in the Communion of Saints during the Creed every week.

The saints weren’t statues of holy cards. They were flesh and blood people who struggled and triumphed with the grace of God. Theirs is an example to imitate, a theme we will continue with in my next letter.