ALL SAINTS: Not "Champions" of an Ideal, but Authentic Men and Women
Elia Carrai - From the early days of Christianity to the present day, there have been people—saints—who bring total trust in Christ to life.
From the time of the New Testament's formation, the Church has known the veneration of saints (Rev 2:12 ff.), recognizing the importance for all believers to look to the lives of those men and women in whom the “how” (kathos) of Christ's love was made manifest once again: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you” (Jn 15:9); “This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 15:12; 13:34).
What was striking about the very first saints—the martyrs and confessors of the faith—was not only their perseverance until death or in persecution; what was decisive was the “how” of their dying and their being persecuted: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:33-34).
Through their very existence, through their living and dying, they made present that impossible forgiveness and that total entrusting of Christ to the Mystery of the Father.
From the beginning, it was the believing people who recognized and venerated those men and women in whom the present life of the Risen One was manifested. The bishops, recognizing the value of this popular veneration, thus began to “canonize” the lives of these men and women, blessed lives, fulfilled in the “how” of Christ's love for the Father and for man; in this sense, “canonical” lives.
Over the centuries, the process of canonization has become increasingly complex, incorporating checks and reviews by pastors. However, the intertwining of the recognition of the faithful—veneration—and that of pastors—canonization—remains inextricable today.
Even today, the process leading to the canonization of a new saint begins with the recognition of the believing people who discern holiness and follow it; it then culminates in the Pope gathering with the cardinals (Ordinary Consistory) to choose the day of the solemn canonization because, as the formula that the Pope addresses to the cardinals states, “You have deemed that these Blessed are proposed for the veneration of the whole Church.”
Those who lead the Church, the Pope and the cardinals, never refer simply to themselves: they refer to Christ, and yet this is not an abstract Christ, but one who is present, real, recognizable, and “indicable” as the life of the Risen One who lives in men and women of all times, generating—as Pope Leo reminded us—“not heroes or champions of some ideal, but authentic men and women” (October 20, 2025).
Looking at the saints, we rediscover, each time, the beauty and real breadth of the community that is the Church, which, as Cardinal Ratzinger recalled, "is not just a small group of activists who come together in a certain place to start a community life. The Church is not even simply the large group of people who gather together on Sundays to celebrate the Eucharist. Finally, the Church is also more than the Pope, bishops, and priests, those who are invested with the sacramental ministry. All those we have mentioned are part of the Church, but the circle of companionship into which we enter through faith goes further, even beyond death. All the saints are part of it, beginning with Abel and Abraham [...]. It includes all the unknown and unnamed, whose faith no one knew except God; it includes people from all places and all times, whose hearts reach out in hope and love toward Christ, “the author and perfecter of faith,” as the Letter to the Hebrews calls him (12:2). It is not the occasional majorities that form here and there in the Church that decide its and our path. They, the saints, are the true, decisive majority by which we orient ourselves. We hold fast to them! They translate the divine into the human, the eternal into time. They are our teachers of humanity, who do not abandon us even in pain and loneliness, but rather walk beside us even in the hour of death" (Ratzinger, La bellezza. La Chiesa, Milan, 2005, pp. 56-57).
Finally, the canonization of a new saint—such as the recent canonization of Cardinal Newman, who is today proclaimed a Doctor of the Church—reminds us that today's saints were yesterday's witnesses, immersed in the circumstances of everyday life, grappling with their own humanity like everyone else.
Holiness is not, therefore, a kind of post-mortem spiritual reward; rather, it is the permanence of Christ's own life in history. We look to the great saints of yesterday to have eyes ever more capable of discerning this life, this blessed fullness, among those who live in our same present today and whose attractiveness of life sets us in motion, awakening all our desire.
These are the men and women who bear witness to us of the “how” of Christ’s love: “Christianity brings into the world a new man, who has an ‘experience of reality’—that is the word—a knowledge and feeling of reality, a relationship with reality different from that of others. […] The structure of the human remains, in its appearance, the same, but it has another meaning, it has another face" (L. Giussani, Attraverso la compagnia dei credenti, Milan, 2021, pp. 50-51).
It is for this “true, decisive majority” that we give thanks on today’s solemnity. This communion of saints, in life and in death, which manifests God in his encounter with us, does not change its method: “He who became flesh remained flesh” (J. Ratzinger, Communio 208-210 (2006), 186).