St. Benedict the Moor Parish

I share it because we often hear the same charge, sometimes even from among ourselves: “keep your faith private.” The Holy Father’s reply is simple. When the Church defends life, she is not choosing left or right. She is applying the Gospel to real people, because Jesus himself is “the way and the truth and the life.”

Notice, too, where he locates that teaching: not first in a legislature but among the sick, beside people wondering whether a life marked by pain or disability still means anything. The Church answers yes. And that answer binds us, not only lawmakers. Each of us must choose whether to draw near to the sick, the elderly, and the lonely in our own homes and on our own blocks, or to let them feel like burdens.
 
Truth without presence can wound; presence without truth drifts into sentiment. Christ gives us both. Read the Pope’s words prayerfully, then ask the Lord whom he is sending you to accompany this week.
 
In Christ,
Fr. Matthew Hawkins

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Due to technical difficulties, the Mass for October 25, 2026, Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, is presented in three parts.

Click here to watch Sunday's Mass.

We end where the Church's calendar ends its year of feasts: with everyone. All Saints Day does not commemorate a famous few. It commemorates the whole company — canonized and uncanonized, well-known and utterly forgotten — of everyone who has died in friendship with God. Revelation pictures "a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue" (Revelation 7:9), and that is precisely the point of the feast: most of the saints have no feast day of their own, no biography, no stained glass. They are simply the ordinary faithful — parents, laborers, the quietly patient, the unnoticed — who said yes the way Mary said yes, in circumstances no one will ever write down.
This is a fitting place to return to the question this whole series has been circling: What do you think we are doing when we honor Mary and the Saints?
 
We are not multiplying gods. We are not hedging against a distant Christ by cultivating friendlier intermediaries. We are not decorating faith with sentiment to make it more bearable. What we are doing, at root, is refusing to let death be the last word on love — insisting, with the whole Church, that the people who shaped us and the people who shaped the faith itself are not gone, only changed, and that the relationship continues in prayer the way it once continued in conversation.
 
We are also protecting a particular kind of truth: that holiness is possible for people like us, because it was achieved by people like us — sinners, converts, the ordinary and the obscure, not a separate class of the naturally good. And we are practicing memory on purpose, refusing the amnesia that lets a culture forget its own witnesses, because a Church that forgets its saints will eventually forget what it is for.
 
But the deepest thing being said in Marian devotion and in the veneration of the saints is this: grace is stronger than shame, stronger than failure, stronger than the ordinary unremarkable texture of most human lives — and it has already proven this, not as a theory, but in the recorded lives of a great cloud of witnesses. Mary's fiat, Augustine's late conversion, Thérèse's small hidden love, and the unrecorded faithfulness of everyone All Saints Day exists to honor — these are not exhibits behind glass. They are companions still praying, still pointing, the way Mary pointed at Cana, toward the same Christ who is asking the same thing of us that he asked of all of them.
 
So arrive at this feast not with a settled answer but with the question itself, because the question is the point: What would it mean for your own ordinary life to become, someday, part of that cloud of witnesses — not because you were exceptional, but because, like them, you kept saying yes? 

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Some of the wealthiest architects of our technological future are, by their own account, quietly building fortified retreats — private refuges to withdraw to if the changes they are unleashing on everyone else go badly. It is worth naming plainly what this is: the prophet Amos saw it three thousand years ago and did not soften his words. "Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory... but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph" (Amos 6:4,6). Securing your own exit while the vulnerable are left to face the flood is one of the oldest patterns of power there is.
The Incarnation is God's direct answer to every bunker ever built. Facing a world in genuine crisis — a world estranged from him, wounded by sin, in need of rescue — God did not retreat to safety above it. He moved in. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (Jn 1:14): the original language carries the sense of pitching a tent, setting up camp in the middle of the mess rather than escaping it. God's answer to crisis was not distance. It was presence.
 
We will each face our own version of this choice, on a much smaller scale — the pull to withdraw from a difficult relationship, a struggling neighborhood, a hard season in the parish, rather than stay and be present to it. It is a real temptation, and often a reasonable-sounding one. But our calling is not to personal survival. It is to communion — to actual, local, embodied presence with the people God has placed around us, especially when things are hard.
 
Bunkers save individuals, at best, and only for a while. Only the tent — only staying, only showing up — actually saves people.
 
For reflection: Is there a person or a situation you have been slowly and quietly withdrawing from because it's difficult? What would it look like this week to pitch your tent there instead — to stay present rather than retreat?

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