November 1, 2026
Jesus Christ: Yesterday, Today, and Forever ~
Last Wednesday evening, we held our annual one-night mission on the holy angels hosted by a priest of Opus Sanctorum Angelorum (Work of the Holy Angels). People who attended the mission had the opportunity to attend Mass, hear a talk on the angels, witness people consecrate themselves to their guardian angels, begin a program to consecrate themselves to their guardian angel next year, and then begin a multi-year program to consecrate themselves to all the angels. What a blessing the ministry of Opus Sanctorum Angelorum has been to us. The mission’s proximity to All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days this year drives home the reality of the Communion of the Saints, which includes the Holy Angels, and our relationship with them.
This Sunday, November 1st, is the Solemnity of All the Saints. “All Saints” refers to all the people the Church has officially acknowledged as saints over the past 2,000 years; as well as all the other people in heaven who are worthy of being a canonized saint but haven’t for lack of information about their lives; as well as all the people in heaven; as well as all the angels of heaven. That’s a lot of people and angels. There is a great spiritual bond within the Communion of Saints: the Church Triumphant (those in the Beatific Vision of Heaven); the Church Suffering (those in the Purgatory of Heaven); and the Church Militant (the Church on earth).
On specific days throughout the year, we honor saints (those people who have gone before us who led heroic lives of holiness) while asking for their prayers from heaven. On about 200 days of the year, the Church honors saints on the liturgical calendar. But there are about 10,000 canonized saints. What about the other roughly 9,800 saints that the Church doesn’t have on the liturgical calendar? On November 1st every year we honor all the saints, known and unknown to us. We admire them, strive to emulate them, thank God for them, and invoke their intercession from heaven. Just as we ask people on earth to pray for us, so too we ask the angels and saints of Heaven to pray for us. The saints are literally with God in Heaven, making their help a truly selfless act done for God’s greater glory, our salvation, and hopefully our sanctification. In short, they have immediate access to God, and their prayers are holier than ours—what a powerful resource for all of us (James 5:16)! Please ask specific saints to intercede for you and others throughout your life—and thank them.
A personal word about the saints in my life.
I didn’t start reading the lives of the saints in earnest until about twenty years ago. This experience over the years has profoundly educated me on the Christian life: who God really is, the life we can and should live, and the life we can and should reject. The lives of the saints offer a profound roadmap to intimate union with God, a life of virtue, and all the good that comes from it, for self and others. Their lives profoundly inspire and simultaneously admonished me; with the biggest takeaway being that I know I can be one too. This in turn brings me great happiness and sadness. Happiness because I can see the goal and the way to get there; sadness, because I am so attached to the “things” that prevent me from becoming a saint. I can’t imagine the deficit in my life if I weren’t reading about the lives of the saints. I can’t encourage you enough to do the same.
I encourage you to read the lives of the saints for all the reasons I do. In addition to the reasons I’ve just given, there is also the super important reality of intercession. As you come to know the saints, you’ll realize how much they want to intercede for you. More than that, you will likely come to know of particular saints who are interceding for you; saints that for some reason are commissioned by God to be your particular intercessors. In addition to the Blessed Virgin Mary and our guardian angels, who intercede in a special way for all of us, there are saints that God has assigned to you because of your state in life, or personality, or struggles, etc. We are not alone on our journey; we don’t carry our crosses alone. Our Lord has given us Simons of Cyrene to help us carry our crosses. So please read the lives of the saints until you die and meet them in the Kingdom of Heaven. Then you too will become someone’s helper from above.
So where do we turn to read about the lives of the saints? Books. While the internet is an obvious place to search for “lives of the saints,” it is very important that we share or order books to read about them. The internet is a great place for information and resources. It is a terrible place for recollection and prayer, two aspects of meditating upon the lives of the saints. With that said, in addition to you doing your own internet search for the lives of the saints, I have a couple of resources for you. The first is Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich’s visions of the lives of some of the saints, especially the early Church saints. She was the greatest seer of the relics in the history of the Church. When presented with a relic without any prior explanation or label, she could intuitively identify the specific saint it belonged to, recount minute and previously unknown details of their lives, and describe the history of the relic and where it had been preserved. Seeing or touching a saint’s relic invariably resulted in her seeing at least some of that saint’s life. Angelico Press is the publishing house you want to use when ordering any of her books. They can be found here – https://angelicopress.com/collections/anne-catherine-emmerich. Another great website for the lives of the saints is Mystics of the Church found here – https://www.mysticsofthechurch.com. I’ll close with a short story of the life Saint Mariam Baouardy from that website. This is a very short part from the much larger story you can read here - https://www.mysticsofthechurch.com/2010/07/blessed-mariam-baouardy-little-arab-and.html
May Almighty God and His Saints Bless You,
Fr. Thomas Nathe
Saint Mariam Baouardy’s martyrdom and miraculous cure through the Blessed Virgin Mary
[In 1858, she was living in Muslim Lebanon at age fourteen, separated from family.] In her isolation from her uncle’s family, she turned to a Muslim servant to have him deliver a letter to Nazareth. For his part, the young man encouraged Mariam to reveal her personal troubles. He became outraged at her uncle’s treatment of her and played upon the mind and feelings of the young girl. He introduced conversion to Islam as a remedy to Mariam’s problems. His words and actions focused young Mariam directly upon her Christianity. However, she soon realized the young man’s true intentions, and this caused her to draw back. She denied his advances and loudly proclaimed her faith in the Church of Jesus. “Muslim, no, never! I am a daughter of the Catholic Church, and I hope by the grace of God to persevere until death in my religion, which is the only true one.”
Her so-called protector, furious at being rejected by this young Christian, became violent. Eyes flashing with hatred he lost control and kicked her to the floor. He then drew his sword and slashed her throat. Thinking her dead, he dumped her bloody body in a nearby dark alley. It was the feast of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary, September 8,1858. What followed was a strange and beautifully moving story, told years later by Mariam to her Mistress of Novices at Marseilles, France:
“A nun dressed in blue picked me up and stitched my throat wound. This happened in a grotto somewhere. I then found myself in heaven with the Blessed Virgin, the angels and the saints. They treated me with great kindness. In their company were my parents. I saw the brilliant throne of the Most Holy Trinity and Jesus Christ in His humanity. There was no sun, no lamp, but everything was bright with light. Someone spoke to me. They said that I was a virgin, but that my book was not finished. "
The scar on her neck remained the rest of her life. It was confirmed during Mariam's illnesses by the doctors and nurses at Marseille, as well as at Pau, Mangalore, and finally at Bethlehem. This scar measured 10 cm in length and 1 cm in width, and marked the whole front of the neck, the skin there was finer and whiter. Several cartilaginous rings of the tracheal artery were missing, as the doctors at Pau attested June 24, 1875. The Mistress of Novices was to write:
"A celebrated doctor at Marseille, who had taken care of Mariam, had confessed that, although he was an atheist, there must be a God, for from a natural point of view, she could not have lived." As a result of this deep cut Mariam`s voice was always hoarse. The martyrdom of the little Arab had not been a dream; it remained inscribed in her flesh.
St. Mariam Baouardy
