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In most of our churches and chapels you will find images, statues and paintings of famous saints – Our Lady, St.Joseph, St.Richard, St.Anthony etc. Most of those saints are significant enough to have their own feast days – today’s feast isn’t really about them. There is a church in a tiny village in Italy which displayed images which speak much more of today’s celebration than our statues of famous and revered saints. In the Church of the Sacred Heart in Ponte a Egola in Tuscany, (near Pisa) a local artist painted images of local people who have died over the last twenty years. These are ordinary folk like Carlo Rossi, the local doctor, Enzo, a simple chap from the village and Rubino, the barber, who also played the fiddle at impromptu night-time concerts. None of them has been canonised, nor are they likely to be, motley group of characters that they are; it is said that many of them never darkened the doors of a church when they were alive – but they had a place in church.! There may be irony there, but there is also hope and a lesson for us about the nature of sainthood.
We don’t have pictures of our recently departed brothers and sisters around our own church but that doesn’t mean that none of them are saints – quite the contrary, I suspect. At the funeral of Pope John Paul II there was a loud acclamation from the crowd of “santo subito” – saint straight away – in the hearts and minds of many of the faithful, he is already a saint because we usually recognise holiness when we see it. And it is by no means restricted to the famous, or to church leaders or the usual suspects. We all know of people who are surely already saints in the mind and heart of GOD, even though they may never get near any official canonisation process. This is their feast day. At the moment, only God knows how many of our friends and relatives and how many of those rural characters from Ponte a Egola are already counted among the heavenly throng. But what we do know is that whoever and however many these people are – we have a vital connection with them. They join us in today’s mass and in every mass – we pray with them and they pray for us. Today is a celebration of the Church in its fullness, a reminder of what we truly experience not just every time we celebrate Eucharist but indeed, every time we pray – by doing these things we are placing ourselves firmly in the grip of the communion of saints.
We are already in touch with this communion of saints, but we also aspire to it; through our baptism we are called to be saints; followers of Christ in this world and saints in the next; one follows the other. This is where we can learn from that little village in Tuscany again: if we are not saints yet – and few would dispute that, then what we are and what we are called to become is, potential saints, saints in waiting – but we don’t often see each other in that way. The villagers of Ponte a Egola probably didn’t see their fishing and drinking partners as potential saints together – but think how transforming it would be if that was how we thought.
How do we treat the saints that we already know about? We revere their images because we respect them; we look to follow their example; we feel they can bring us closer to God; we join them in prayer and hope that they will pray for us; we participate in the Eucharist with them and enjoy their company. All of those things can be said of ourselves as potential saints. In fact, if we treat each other in that way, then surely we will be a little bit closer to saintliness ourselves.
So this is truly a feast of the whole church in its entirety, it is, in faith, hope and potential, our own feast day. We may never have our statues or pictures in church or our names read out in St Peter’s square but already share the image and likeness of God and God’s will is that we complete our pilgrimage by joining all those too numerous to name whose feast is today.
An afterword –
Shortly after I delivered this homily we learned that the pastoral council at Ponte a Egola had found the artist’s display too drastic a break with tradition. So the modern images were removed, and the ancient saints restored. But for a while, at least, some villagers had their honorary canonisation, and as I pointed out, who
but God knows how many of them are already among the heavenly throng – for eternity!