Faculty Blog: All Saints, All Souls, All Sorts

Today, on the Memorial of St. Martin de Porres, I had the seminary Mass. These were the readings of the day Readings and below is the homily.

The great convert and preacher, Msgr. Ronald Knox once said, "The Church is divided into three large bits; part of it is on earth, part of it is in heaven, part of it is in Purgatory. The Church in heaven is All Saints. The Church in Purgatory is All Souls. The Church on earth is all sorts."

And here we are. All Sorts. We are all sorts invited to become all saints. The first step, after being invited by the Lord into the life of charity, is actually to reply to the invitation.

The original invitees in today’s Gospel all responded negatively. I myself have never owned land or had a wife. And, I presume that most of us—at least those who live inside of RT 495—have never purchased oxen. All of us, however, have our excuses ready at hand as to why we must turn down the Lord’s daily invitations to us. Worse yet, sometimes we don’t even bother sending an RSVP. We don’t feel the need to reply or to excuse ourselves. We can let these invitations pass without a second thought. (This, by the way, is one way our daily examen can be of great help to us. We are confronted in those moments by all of the invitations that have come our way during the day.)

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Fr. David Barnes is the Director of Spiritual Formation at Saint John's Seminary