Today is the feast of All Saints. Throughout the year, the Church celebrates the lives of men and women who lived lives of heroic faithfulness. This cycle of celebrations throughout the Church year is known as the sanctorale. On today’s feast, the feast of All Saints, the Church gathers all of those celebrations into one feast—we honor all holy men and women, those we officially recognize as saint or blessed, along with all those who are in heaven and known only to God, and, indeed all those faithful still living, who look forward to reaching the fullness of blessedness in heaven. All who are baptized into the mystical Body of Christ are celebrated on this feast.

In the opening prayer for Mass on the feast of All Saints, the Church acknowledges these holy men and women are a great gift to the Church from God. They are examples to us of how to live life in imitation of Christ in large and small moments of life. British mystic and writer Caryll Houselander sums up the mission of the saint perfectly:

“Sometimes it may seem to us that there is no purpose to our lives, that going day after day for years to this office or that school or factory is nothing else but waste and weariness. But it may be that God has sent us there because but for us, Christ would not be there. If our being there means that Christ is there, that alone makes it worthwhile.”

FaithND offers details of the lives of saints in this daily series because the saints remind us of our own common calling to become holy by imitating Christ in our own life—whether that be on the fields of France, in the classroom, or in a daily routine that, too often, feels like waste and weariness.

Veneration of the saints shows us that Christianity is made of real, ordinary people, and is made for real, ordinary people. Jesuit priest Robert Taft describes liturgy as religion “from the bottom up, as ‘something real people did.’” The saints are these real people who not only lived the liturgy, who practiced religion “from the bottom up,” but who then become an icon of the “up” for which the faithful strive. Through hagiography, that is, the record of the saints’ lives, the lives of the saints become beautiful examples of how our lives can be transformed through the mystery of Christ.

The ceiling of the Lady Chapel in the Basilica is painted with the mural, “The Exaltation of the Cross,” which depicts the Saints in heaven (our featured image). This mural reminds us that the liturgy we celebrate at the altar is not simply earthly. The saints present in this mural illustrate how Christ can transform all our lives into eucharistic sacrifices of praise to God. We offer up our lives, like the Mass, in thanksgiving to God who has given us everything we need. Notre Dame professor Lawrence Cunningham describes hagiography as “Christianity from below rather than from above,” meaning that the saints show us, in a very practical way, what Christianity is, in a different way than a dogma like the Immaculate Conception or doctrines we recite in the Nicene Creed.

From the very first martyrs, whose bones and bodies were preserved with great care, honoring the physical remains of saints has played a part of the Catholic veneration of saints. The practice of honoring relics first led to the veneration of saints, as Christians gathered for prayer in the martyria above the martyrs’ tombs. In the middle ages, pilgrims would travel many miles to venerate famous relics, such as those of St. James in Compostela, Spain, or those of the true cross in Jerusalem and throughout Europe. The stealing and selling of relics was a scandalous corruption of this practice that was one of the many catalysts to the Protestant Reformation.

The current reliquary chapel (pictured to the right) was consecrated along with the Lady Chapel in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart one hundred twenty-five years ago. The reliquary now holds more than 1,600 relics of different types that represent nearly 800 saints.

Relics remind us that the stories that we hear of these men and women, who lived lives of holiness in all times and places, were real people with flesh and blood. Relics remind us that we share the same call to holiness and the same eternal destiny of union with God in heaven, and they tell us that this calling and this destiny is within our reach if we seek to conform our lives to Christ.

On this feast of All Saints, all you holy women and men, saints of God—pray for us!