Message from Fr. Rolando Cabrera

Immaculate Conception Catholic Parish

This Friday is the Solemnity of All Saints. On that day, we celebrate not only those saints whose names show up in the Church calendar but ALL Saints. In the first reading, Saint John speaks of the saints in heaven as “a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people and tongue...” And the most beautiful thing about this celebration is that among that great multitude there can be people we know very well: our parents, grandparents, relatives and friends.

In our lifetime, we have all known people of tremendous faith and holiness of life. They will never be officially declared as saints and given the honor of the altars by the Church, but we do hope they are contemplating the face of God in heaven. All Saints is their Feast.

All Saints also reminds us that each and everyone of us is called to be a saint. Holiness is not just for a bunch of privileged people. Holiness is the vocation of every baptized Christian. Saints are not a different breed of people. They are ordinary people, like you and me, with their virtues and shortcomings, but people who are determined to live truly as children of God and follow the path of the Beatitudes. Of course, we have all heard about the heroism of the martyrs, the miracles of the most popular saints, the extraordinary works of the great reformers and founders of religious orders, the visions of the mystics... Yet, most of the saints we will honor on All Saints Day went about their daily lives quietly, humbly without doing anything more dramatic than living out Jesus’ Beatitudes.

The wonderful message of All Saints is that no matter where we come from, what we have been, what we have done… we can still be saints. Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. We can be sure that among that multitude of saints in heaven there are people who have gone through the same struggles, trials, temptations, difficulties, failures… like yours and mine. But they never gave up and never forgot who God meant them to be. None of us is born a saint, but everyone of us, with the help of God’s grace, can become one.

God bless you all!

Fr. Rolando Cabrera
Pastor