A sermon given by a London senior social worker on All Saints’ Day 1986, during the Spode House conference ‘The Catholic Church and Aids’.

It is a happy chance for me to preach the sermon at Mass on All Saints’ Day, because twenty years ago today I became a Catholic. It is a doubly happy chance that I should do this at a conference on the Catholic Church and Aids, for when we think about the saints and sanctity we will arrive at a clearer idea of what, Aids being in our midst, we can do about it.

For twenty years, each All Saints’ Day, I have heard homilies which have all had one theme in common—that today is the feast primarily of the unsung heroes of the Church—those countless men and women not singled out for special mention, through canonisation and special feast days, who are in heaven. As an antidote to the plaster statue school of piety which manages for me to make the whole idea of sanctity at once impossibly remote and unattractive, I can only applaud the general trend of All Saints’ homilies. (Who is really inspired by knowing that St. Aloysius, as a baby, refused his mother’s milk on Fridays?) Also it does us no harm to be reminded that we are all called to be saints, that our hallowing—so far from being some horrid obstacle course comprised solely of self-denial and martyrdom—is the great gift of life that God has in mind for all of us.