FAITH ALIVE
By Russell Shaw
(OSV News) – The author of the Letter to the Hebrews wrote, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith” (12:1-2).
This passage is a beautiful description of the communion of saints, something so fundamental to the Christian faith that all Christians express their belief in it when reciting the Apostles’ Creed.
A saint is someone who is in heaven – it is as simple as that. While “saint” as a title is reserved to those whose lives the church has thoroughly investigated (typically through whose intercession two miracles can be demonstrated to have occurred), the term applies to anyone in heaven.
Everyone from your saintly grandmother to the martyrs facing death for Christ: They are all part of the communion of saints. The church commemorates all these saints on All Saints’ Day.
The history of the feast reveals a great deal about the church’s understanding of the communion of saints. The communion of saints is the church, both the living and dead.
All Saints’ Day was not always a solemnity observed by the universal church, and is not celebrated everywhere on Nov. 1. The feast originated in the earliest centuries of the church, when Christians commemorated the many martyrs who died at the hands of their Roman persecutors.
Because there were so many martyrs, they could not each have their own feast day; but they were seen as such important witnesses that the Christians did not want to leave any of them out.
As a result, a single commemoration for “all the martyrs” was observed each spring, which celebrated those who did not have their own unique feast.
This is the earliest observance we know about of something similar to All Saints’ Day. Many of the Eastern Catholic churches still commemorate All Saints’ Day in the spring.
After Christianity was legalized throughout the Roman Empire in 313 and the violent and bloody persecutions came to an end, it was common to commemorate the martyrs in various areas around the empire.
We even see this referred to in the writings of the saints, with St. Ephrem (d. 373) and St. John Chrysostom (d. 407) making reference to a commemoration of all saints.
This practice spread far throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, with commemorations of all saints showing up in Antioch, Rome, England, Salzburg and more.
In the early seventh century, Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Roman Pantheon – formerly a shrine to all the gods of Roman mythology – as a Christian church of the Blessed Virgin and all the martyrs.
Pope Gregory III consecrated a chapel at St. Peter’s Basilica to all the saints, as well, with an anniversary date of Nov. 1. Rome adopted Nov. 1 as the date of the feast of All Saints in the eighth century, and in the ninth century Pope Gregory IV extended that observance to the whole of the Latin Church.
Now, centuries later, All Saints’ Day is a holy day of obligation and recognized as one of the most important feasts on the liturgical calendar. However, the celebration of Halloween typically overshadows the commemoration of All Saints’ Day.
Most of us realize that Halloween is in reality the vigil of All Saints’ (“Allhallows Eve” or “Hallow E’en”), but All Saints’ Day itself has become a bit of an afterthought.
It shouldn’t be this way! The saints are our friends, our intercessors, our brothers and sisters in Christ. They care deeply for us, and their lives are recognized by the church as exemplary, as models to follow.
So how can we celebrate this wonderful feast of All Saints’ Day?
Whether you are commemorating individually or in a group or a family, there are many ways to observe this solemnity. The most obvious is: Go to Mass! It is a holy day of obligation, and there is no more appropriate way to commemorate the saintly lives of those who have gone before us than the eucharistic sacrifice.
It is also good to do other liturgical or prayerful things to mark the day: Pray the Divine Office for All Saints’ Day; read the lives of the saints; watch a movie about a saint; pray the litany of saints; think back to your confirmation saint and study that saint’s life.
Similarly, if any of your children share the name of a saint, learn about that saint together: Read about the saint and pray together, asking for the saint’s intercession.
There are also a number of creative and fun games that can be played to help celebrate All Saints’ Day. Try putting on a play of the life of a saint (many Halloween costumes can be repurposed to be saints costumes). There are books for all ages, coloring books and even comic books featuring the saints.
All Saints’ Day is the perfect time to pray to all these holy men and women, asking for their intercession for the conversion of sinners, so that we might all become saints.

(Senz works for Ignatius Press and is a freelance writer who lives with his wife and four children in Oregon.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In 1979, Sheldon Vanauken published a book entitled “A Severe Mercy”; in it he tells the story of the death of his wife, Davey. The book is an account of an extraordinary romance, cut short while still in full bloom by Davey’s premature death.
This story has intrigued many people, both because of the extraordinary relationship between Sheldon and Davey before her death and because of the relationship between them after her death.
Vanauken describes how after her death he still felt her presence strongly and vividly. She was gone, in that brutal and irrevocable way death takes loved ones away, but he still felt her presence – as real as he had before she died.
In the early months after her death, her presence to him was constant, guiding, sure, consoling, the same as it had been while she was alive. She had died, but inside himself he felt her present – as wife, lover, best friend, soulmate. And during those months he always carried her wedding ring in his pocket, which he fingered tenderly many times each day. Touching it helped keep him aware of her presence.

One day, while on a ship crossing the Atlantic, he felt her presence change. In the silence of his heart and soul, he felt her speaking to him, telling him that, up to now, they had needed that kind of presence with each other, but that this now needed to change. They needed to move to a different plane in their relationship. She was telling him that she needed to “let him go” in the way she had been present to him until now and she needed to ask him to “let her go” in the way they were now present to each other. It was a difficult moment, but Sheldon understood its meaning. He took the ring from his pocket and quietly dropped it into the ocean.
From then onward, Davey was still present to him, but now in a new way. Her presence now was less explicit, though not more distant. Now her presence was less that of the earthly wife, soulmate and best friend, and more the presence of a person who loves you and holds you in a way that’s harder to describe.
Thousands of persons who have lost loved ones to death, including myself, can identify with that story, both in terms of feeling the presence of a deceased loved one inside ourselves, and in terms of feeling this relationship, at a point, develop and move to a new plane.
In my own case, I lost both parents when I was 23 years old. For nearly two years, like Sheldon Vanauken, I felt their presence as sure, guiding and parental (they were still very much my mom and dad, still very much with me); though, in my case, it was not always a consoling and warm presence. The pain of their loss would occasionally bring me feelings and tears that were not warm. My mom and dad were still with me, but at this early stage their deaths still left a cold scar.
However, sometime between the first and second year after their deaths this changed. For me, unlike for Vanauken, there wasn’t a clear moment when this happened. It happened gradually and imperceptibly, their presence to me and within me changed.
But, parallel to Vanauken’s experience, what I experienced was a shift in presence from one plane to another. I still felt their presence, just as before, but now something had let go, even as something else took its place.
I felt their presence now as a deep consolation and their loss no longer hurt as before. I no longer felt a need to pray for them. Instead, now I felt a need (which I still feel today) to pray to them.
They were still my parents, but something had changed. I hesitate to use words to describe this because they might sound vague and wishful, but what I felt can only be characterized this way: They were still my parents – alive, deeply concerned for me, and more present in my life than they ever could be while still in this life. But now I felt that presence as something higher, more universally shared with others, and more tied to God’s love and presence to me. It became harder to differentiate their presence from the general feeling of divine providence that I sense in my life,
I come from a large family. Basically, all my siblings had a similar experience. Moreover, many people have shared similar stories concerning how they continue to feel their relationships with their deceased loved ones change and grow even after their deaths.
Vanauken’s story of an ongoing, developing relationship with a loved one who has died is paralleled everywhere. Relationships continue to grow and develop even after death.
Exotic stuff? No! Tis the stuff of dogma. One of the essential articles of our faith teaches that death doesn’t end a relationship.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a professor of spirituality at Oblate School of Theology and award-winning author.)

REFLECTIONS ON LIFE
By Melvin Arrington
“Is this heaven?” I asked myself this question repeatedly throughout the day. Everyone around me declared that this was almost like being in heaven. They all affirmed that heaven must be something like this place. But no, this was not heaven; it was Missouri, to be specific, the Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, where, on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026, our busload of pilgrims from Oxford, Mississippi, joined with 50,000 other souls gathered there for the three-hour-long beatification mass for Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. It was a celebratory event I had been looking forward to for a long time. It did not disappoint.
The breathtakingly beautiful opening procession, which lasted almost as long as a typical Sunday Mass, included 1,000 priests, 850 seminarians, 850 men and women religious, 260 deacons, 89 bishops, and four cardinals. This visual spectacle combined with the celestial sounds of the choir and orchestra transformed what was once a pro football arena into what seemed like a little corner of heaven.
An overwhelming sensation of joy came upon me as I realized I was being granted the privilege of participating in this very special moment in the life of the Church!
The high point of any Mass is always when we receive Our Lord’s precious Body and Blood in the Eucharist. But there were so many other spectacular moments as well, such as when the now sixteen-year-old James Fulton Engstrom, the so-called “miracle baby,” processed in carrying Archbishop Sheen’s relic, his lower jawbone.
James was born with no heartbeat, no pulse, nothing. His parents immediately began praying, asking for Sheen’s intercession. Then, after 61 minutes had passed, when the doctors were about to call the time of death, the child began to breathe. He not only survived but grew into a normal little boy with no signs of organ damage. In 2019 Pope Francis officially recognized the baby’s healing as a miracle, which cleared the way for the beatification to take place.
How appropriate that Sheen’s mandible serves as his primary relic! For over three decades his majestic voice was heard regularly on NBC radio’s Catholic Hour. In the 1950s, his television program “Life Is Worth Living” reached an estimated audience of 30 million weekly at the height of its popularity. Paying homage to Sheen’s finely-honed speaking skills, Billy Graham called him “the greatest communicator of the twentieth century.”

While many people consider Fulton J. Sheen to be the first great Catholic televangelist, young people are now calling him the first Catholic influencer and content creator. I’m not at all sure what that means.
It has been said that the archbishop has more converts to his credit than anyone else in history, including St. Paul and St. Francis Xavier. When Pope Pius XII asked him how many conversions he was responsible for, Sheen responded: “Your Holiness, I have never counted them. I am always afraid if I did count them, I might think I made them, instead of the Lord.”
Whatever the total may be, I include myself in that number because I owe my conversion to the Catholic faith to Blessed Fulton J. Sheen. In my view, Sheen must be a saint because he continues to lead souls to Christ today, almost half a century after his death.
At a time in my life when I was searching for something more than my Protestantism could provide, trying to go deeper into my Christian faith, as C. S. Lewis would say, “further up and further in,” I re-discovered Fulton J. Sheen. Re-discover is the proper word because I can recall seeing him on television when I was very young and completely captivated by his theatrical gestures, his visually stunning vestments (especially that cape!), and his soul-piercing eyes. But as I got older and he became less visible to the public eye, he totally fell off my radar screen.
Then, in 2001, by chance, I came across a book titled “America’s Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen” by Thomas C. Reeves, and from that moment on, everything changed. I saw Sheen’s picture on the cover and recognized him immediately. To say that I stumbled upon that book by chance is not accurate; surely, it was God guiding me all along the way.
Curious to find out more about this enigmatic figure from my past, I began to do a little research and found out that he had been a university professor, which meant that he must have written something. A quick check revealed that he had authored dozens of books, numerous pamphlets, and countless magazine and newspaper pieces, which explains why part of the archbishop’s hand was chosen as one of his relics. In addition to all those books, I also ran across many of his old “Life Is Worth Living” TV shows.
Slowly, I began to work my way through all this print and video material. Sheen’s sharp insights, the clarity and compelling nature of his arguments, and his good cheer and humor gradually won me over. At some point it dawned upon me – I was no longer Protestant.
Continuing to plow ahead, I eventually made my way to the Catholic faith, thanks to Sheen’s teachings. What began as a brief nostalgic reflection ended with a life-changing conversion. Thanks be to God! Although Sheen died in 1979, I’m absolutely convinced that during all those years when I was seeking the truth, he was praying for me.
The beatification Mass in St. Louis was the experience of a lifetime for me and my traveling companions. So, what’s the next step? What do we do for an encore? Maybe there will be another opportunity for a pilgrimage, this time to Sheen’s tomb in the Cathedral of St. Mary’s of the Immaculate Conception in Peoria, Illinois. If so, I’m ready!
Blessed Fulton J. Sheen, pray for us!

(Melvin Arrington is a Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages for the University of Mississippi and a member of St. John Oxford.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Every year I try to write an article on suicide because it is perhaps the most misunderstood of all deaths and it wreaks a unique havoc among the family and the loved ones left behind.

They are left with a blizzard of ambivalent and conflicting feelings: shame (What a shameful way to die); guilt (Somehow I should have done more); second-guessing (Why wasn’t I more attentive?); anger (This was an act of selfishness); and anxiety (How can this person go to heaven?) Moreover, in effect, this ruins the memory the person who died by suicide.

Throughout my articles on suicide and my book (Bruised & Wounded: Struggling to Understand Suicide) I have tried to emphasize that in most cases of suicide:

• We are dealing with an extremely sensitive and wounded person, someone who at one level is too bruised to touch.
• In suicide, a person dies against his or her will, akin to jumping out of a high-rise window because your clothing is on fire.
• A death by suicide is the emotional and psychological equivalent of cancer, stroke, or heart-attack. For this reason we no longer use the verb “committed” suicide since we never say that someone committed cancer, or a stroke, or a heart attack. Suicide, in most cases, is not a voluntary act.
• In many cases too, suicidal depression has a biochemical root.
• We need not worry about that person’s eternal salvation. He or she had a good heart and God reads the heart. Sometimes a person can descend into a state into which the best of human love, medicine, and psychiatry can no longer reach, but faith assures us that there is no depressive hell that God cannot descend into and breathe out peace.
• We need to give ourselves permission to feel all the ambivalent feelings we will have about our loved one and his or her manner of death. That’s a healthy grieving process that should not be short-circuited. Eventually the memory of our loved one and his or her spirit will come to us in peace and understanding.
• Our task, after our grieving period, is to redeem the memory of our loved one so that our loved one’s life is not seen and judged through the prism of his or her death. Put their photos back up on the walls, no longer speak of them in hushed tones, celebrate their lives, and speak healthily of the special spirit they brought into the world.
  
  Margaret Atwood once said that sometimes things need to be said, and said, and said again, until they don’t need to be said anymore. These points on suicide still need to be said.
  
  Beyond these assertions, let me add two more perspectives on suicide that I have found helpful.
  
  The first one is a lesson from nature. Here’s Elilf Shafak, a botanist, reflecting on the suicide of his friend’s mother: “When I was a young botanist, I was asked to diagnose a tree that was not doing well. It seemed to be dying. After many tests, nothing conclusive, I took a shovel and began to dig, and I learned a lesson I have never forgotten, girdling was happening below the surface. The tree was being strangled by its own roots. If the encircling roots are not found on time, they start putting pressure on the tree and it just becomes too much to bear. … Your mother’s death has nothing to do with the absence of love. She was blooming and thriving with your love, and I’d like to believe with mine too, but underneath something was strangling her: the past, the memories, the roots.”
  
  Sometimes our own roots (complexity, trauma, confusion, frustration, biology) can be so overpowering that they work at killing the body. As James Hillman writes in his book “Suicide and the Soul,” sometimes there are deep things inside us that cannot make themselves heard and their frustration eventually works to strangle the body. Our own roots are sometimes such a complex mixture of soul and biology that we begin to asphyxiate.
  
  The second thought comes from Jeffrey Monroe in his book “Reading Buechner: Exploring the Work of a Master Memoirist, Novelist, Theologian, and Preacher.” Frederick Buechner, a Christian pastor, had to deal with his dad’s suicide. As a son, as man of faith, as a pastor trying to help others understand, he searched for answers vis-à-vis his dad’s suicide.
  The answers didn’t come easily, or seemingly at all. Eventually, Buechner came to this understanding of his dad’s suicide.
  The best pastoral answer in the face of inexplicable tragedy (his dad’s suicide) isn’t an answer at all. It’s a presence. On this side of eternity, we won’t get all the answers, not least to the question of suicide. Sometimes there is no satisfactory answer in our darkest moments, like when we lose a loved one to suicide. What matters most in those dark moments is that we can trust that God did not abandon our loved one. And what we desire more than answers is God.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a professor of spirituality at Oblate School of Theology and award-winning author.)

THEOPHILUS PATHS
By Ely Segura
I wonder where I’ve been all this time, as I didn’t know Archbishop Fulton Sheen until relatively recently. It wasn’t until I arrived in Chicago in 2019 that his name began to ring a bell.

One evening, while browsing YouTube for material for my parish ministry, I came across a video from the 1950s in which an eloquent and lively bishop shared words of wisdom on the meaning of our existence. It was the now Venerable Fulton John Sheen in one of the episodes of his well known TV show “Life Is Worth Living.” I was immediately captivated.

Hearing Fulton Sheen for the first time, I felt a sense of nostalgia that wasn’t my own; nostalgia for something great that I hadn’t experienced at the time, but which I realized had been a watershed moment for the American Church in the last century. A man of substance, filled with God, spoke with courage and enthusiasm about the Triune God on national television, wearing the vestments of a consecrated Catholic bishop with pride and joy. Brilliant! I got goosebumps straight away!

His work, like all of God’s work, endures to this day, spreading throughout the world. For example, I was certainly familiar with the missionary rosary and had indeed prayed it with the very same intention with which Sheen had conceived it in 1951.

I came across words attributed to the Chilean writer Isabel Allende that really struck a chord with me: I am not afraid of death; I am afraid of a lack of passion, of not having lived with sufficient intensity. St. Irenaeus of Lyon had already alluded to this in the second century of Christianity when he stated: “The glory of God is man fully alive, and true life for man is the vision of God.”

For me, Fulton Sheen is the epitome of a human being who embodies these statements. He was a man overflowing with divine grace and wisdom, capable of affirming through his testimony – despite his many trials and tribulations – that life is worth living, cherishing and sharing in every second that is granted to us.

In May 2024, I fulfilled a goal I had set myself before leaving Chicago: to visit the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Museum, located at the Diocese of Peoria’s Spalding Pastoral Center. After all, it couldn’t be true that, living in the same state where my dear Fulton Sheen was born and lived, I wouldn’t go to see it.
I prepared briefly for my visit there by reading a heart-warming memoir written by Joan Sheen Cunningham (one of the bishop’s nieces) entitled “My Uncle Fulton Sheen.” I booked a room in a hotel near the museum for a couple of days and, filled with the Pentecostal enthusiasm of those days, set off on a train journey to Peoria.

The museum is just a short walk from the Cathedral of St Mary of the Immaculate Conception, where the young Fulton Sheen was ordained a priest in 1919, and where his mortal remains now rest. Although it is, in reality, a small and simple space, I felt an overwhelming emotion there that I had to contain, as I had made this pilgrimage on my own and had no one there with whom to share it.

During my stay in Peoria, I visited the museum and the cathedral twice. I tried to take in as much as possible of all the exquisitely selected information and all the objects so harmoniously displayed. I watched at my leisure a film shown in a room in the museum decorated to look like the set of the show “Life Is Worth Living.” I loved it. I bought a copy of the film so that I could share its content with my community later.

It is easy to imagine the joy I felt when the Vatican announced the official date of Sheen’s beatification. To celebrate, I proposed “Treasure in Clay,” his spiritual autobiography, as the title for my Catholic book club last April.

I rejoice with the whole Church. I rejoice because another of our own is being raised to the altars. I am eager to share this admiration for him, his fidelity to Christ and the way in which he taught us to live. I constantly present my pastoral and professional intentions (which are one and the same) to Sheen, and I pray that others may not go through this life – as I did for so long – without having the joy of knowing of the existence of this remarkable human being.

(Ely Segura is a laywoman and creator of the Teófilo project, an initiative for the faith formation of Hispanic adults in the United States – www.proyectoteofilo.com.)

Ordinary Times
By Lucia A. Silecchia
“Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

This season, with somber hearts, we mark 25 years since achingly bright September skies were filled with the horrors of an evil still incomprehensible.

For so many years, whenever I took the train from Washington back to New York, the Twin Towers were the first sign in the distance to tell me I was almost home. New York City’s skyline without them still startles me after all these years.

In far greater losses than steel and stone, my high school, parish and neighborhood in Queens were home to those who never came home that day. In Washington, I shared a University family and a parish with those who perished at the Pentagon. When I learned that the last flight could have been bound for the Capitol, above the subway where I was commuting in the last innocent moments of that day, I wondered whether I might owe my own life to the heroism of those whose lives ended in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Now, that dark day lies a quarter of a century ago. Most of my students were not alive that day. If they were, most were blessed with such youth that they would have no memories of it. My prayer for these generations that follow us is that they will never know a day like that one, when the evil that mankind is capable of plays out in real time before them.

As years go by, it becomes ever easier to view the events of that day as historical affairs, to be studied with the mind but no longer felt with the heart. Those of us who recall that day owe a sacred obligation to those before us and those who come after us, to remember those whose lives ended that morning, and in the tragic aftermath of that morning. Sometimes, when losses are so many, and the list of those who perished is so long, we can lose sight of the individual people who were lost.

Those who died that day were living the ordinary times so often taken for granted. The police officers, firefighters, first responders, chaplains and members of the military were doing what they do each and every day – ready to give up their lives for others. The airline pilots and flight crews were engaged in the awesome responsibilities they have when, around the clock and around the world, passengers entrust their lives to them.

The thousands who went to work for the last time that day were parents, seeking only to earn a living and return home to the embrace of their children. They were older workers, laboring in the last year or two of their careers, anticipating the family times they thought lay ahead. They were young people, the same ages as my students, starting their first jobs in the hopes of a bright future. They were those working hard at the top rungs of the ladder of success, and they were those working difficult, minimum wage jobs so that their children would not have to do the same. They were those who were on flights for the myriad reasons we travel, and those who were where they were that day through seemingly inexplicable happenstance.

They were newlyweds in the springtime of new love, and those who cherished the spouse whose hand they had held for decades in sickness and health and in good times and bad. They were women carrying their children within them, in eager anticipation of holding newborns in their arms within a few short months or weeks. They were friends making plans to be with friends to enjoy those happy bonds of affection.

All were those for whom the day began with no hint of what was to come. While some were or became well known in the aftermath of that day, most lived the quiet hopes and dreams of ordinary lives.

In the holy fragility of life, each of those thousands of our sisters and brothers had a unique place in the world that no one else could fill.

Since that day, their loved ones have mourned for them even as life resumed, never the same. So many of us remember the images of those who were lost as they were that day. But their loved ones lost all the days since then. They lost all the joys, sorrows, hopes, dreams, good times and hard times that would have filled these past 25 years. These 9,125 days. These 219,000 hours.
This year, although 25 years have passed, there are so many for whom grief is still fresh. Whatever else we might do this Sept. 11, let us take some time to pray in the early hours of the day, when we recall what happened that morning a quarter of a century ago.
With gratitude for all whose heroism brought light to a dark day and showed the world a glimpse of the face of God.

With hope for all those lost that day, that their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
And with love for all whose hearts still grieve. May God comfort them as they mourn their beloved and ache for so many lost moments of ordinary time.

(Lucia A. Silecchia is a Professor of Law at the Catholic University of America. “On Ordinary Times” is a biweekly column reflecting on the ways to find the sacred in the simple. Email her at silecchia@cua.edu.)