Letter of November 4, 2005

Our Communion of Saints
The Most Reverend Carl F. Mengeling, Bishop of Lansing

The Solemnity of All Saints on November 1st celebrates the Saints, our brothers and sisters in Christ. They and we are members of the Communion of Saints. In Revelation, the last book of the Bible, John the Evangelist writes: "I had a vision of a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people and tongue".

Our Holy Father, Benedict wrote much about Saints and their place in the Church and our lives. Among his many books is ‘Called to Communion’ (1991). In the chapter ‘A Company in Constant Renewal’, he writes" "The Church is not only the group who came together in a given place to set parish life in motion. Nor is the Church merely those who meet on Sunday to celebrate the Eucharist. Finally, the church is also more than the pope, bishops and priests, the holders of sacramental office. All of these belong to the Church, but the radius of the ‘company’ into which we enter by faith reaches farther - beyond the limits of death.

To the Church belong all the Saints: from Abel and Abraham and all the Old Testament witnesses of hope, through Mary, the Mother of the Lord, and the Lord’s Apostles and Two Millennia of Saints. The Church includes all the unknown and unnamed "whose faith is known to God alone". The Church embraces men and women of all places and all times whose hearts stretch out in hope and love to Christ, the ‘author and finisher of faith’.

The majorities that may form here or there in the history of the Church do not decide their own path. The saints are the true, the normative majority by which we orient ourselves. Let us adhere to them; they translate the divine into the human, eternity into time. They never abandon us in our pain and solitude; indeed, they accompany us at the hour of death.

Yes, the Saints are our people. Like us, they in their time were called to conversion; to holiness in Christ. St. John Chrysastom (+407) says: "Christ take sinners and turns them into saints. When we enter the Ark of Christ’s Church we enter as a caterpillar and depart as a butterfly".

It’s encouraging to remember that ‘there is no saint without a past’ and ‘there is no sinner without a future’. Mary, the Immaculate Conception, is the only exception.

The late John Paul II said: "Set the light of the Saints as a lamp stand, so we don’t stumble in the dark of our own making. By the light of the saints, which is really the light of Christ in our world, we see light".