Annual Remembrance of Holy Men and Women of Local Churches

Annual Remembrance of the Holy Men & Women of the Local Churches

The Salesian Family Counts 174 Saints, Blesseds, Venerables, and Servants of God

(ANS – Rome – November 18, 2024) – The particular Churches, starting from the Jubilee Year 2025, are invited to remember and honor on November 9 every year the saints who have characterized the Christian journey and local spirituality. That day is the feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, the cathedral church of Rome. With a letter dated November 9, 2024, the Pope urges the particular Churches to remember their own saints, blesseds, venerables, and servants of God as examples and intercessors who have responded to the universal call to holiness.

The Holy Father wrote: “We are called to allow ourselves to be inspired by these models of holiness, among whom stand out first of all the martyrs who shed their blood for Christ, and those who have been beatified and canonized for being examples of Christian life and our intercessors. We then think of the venerables, men and women whose heroic exercise of virtue has been recognized, of those who in singular circumstances have made of their lives an offering of love to the Lord and to their brothers and sisters, as well as the servants of God whose causes for beatification and canonization are underway.... They are all our friends, companions on the road, who help us realize our baptismal vocation to the full and show us the most beautiful face of the Church, which is holy and the mother of the saints.”

Every local Church is therefore invited to promote this remembrance with appropriate initiatives.

For the Salesian Family, this is also a great opportunity to promote all the causes of beatification and canonization that the office of the general postulator accompanies in communion with the local Churches. “This initiative,” Fr. Pierluigi Cameroni, postulator for the Salesian Family’s causes of saints, reminds us, “emphasizes that the causes are an ecclesial event: they have great ecclesial relevance and constitute a wealth that involves the entire Christian community. They are not something private, but a gift to the Church and a good of the Church. Giving an ecclesial dimension to a cause is vital. The processes of discernment, the collection of testimonies and documents, the attention to the reputation for holiness and the signs that accompany every inquiry, must have this ecclesial dimension, involving dioceses, parishes, groups, the Salesian Family and must value the places of origin, life, and death of the candidates for holiness.”

Such an ecclesial dimension is very effective not only to make the candidates for holiness better and more directly known as exemplary witnesses of the following of Christ, but also to foster in the faithful a readiness – in addition to imitation – to implore spiritual/material graces and favors. This strengthens and develops in them a feeling of closeness, also psychological and existential, to the saints, an affinity of heart and mind, an affective and spiritual “sympathy,” a spiritual communion that, while keeping alive the reputation of holiness and of signs, flows into a true pedagogy of holiness.

The 174 saints, blesseds, venerables, and servants of God of the Salesian charismatic family also shine “like stars in the heavens,” in the firmament of the Church’s holiness. They are to be sought out, looked upon, thanked, invoked as blessed seeds, steeped in heaven, imbued with God, oases of hope, which enlighten and sustain others on their earthly pilgrimage toward the homeland of Heaven.