OMIWORLD

On the occasion of the Solemnity of All Saints, the Superior General presided over the Eucharistic celebration at the General House, marking the conclusion of the Orientation Session for the Major Superiors. Below is his inspiring homily, delivered during the celebration.


HOMILY NOVEMBER 1, 2025
Rome, Chapel of the General House

Dear brothers,

I wish to congratulate and wish the joy of an evangelical life to all the members of our charismatic family and, in a special way, to the new superiors of our Oblate Units, who with this Eucharist conclude their orientation meeting.

We celebrate the Solemnity of All Saints in the context of the Jubilee of Hope and at the threshold of the bicentenary of our Pontifical Approval. Two hundred years ago, Eugene de Mazenod was traveling. He had left Marseille on October 26 and would arrive in Rome on November 26 of the Jubilee Year of 1825. Through his letters and his diary, we can follow in his footsteps, gain insight into his feelings, and contemplate his spiritual journey. It would do us much good in these days to prepare for our bicentenary by following the footsteps that Saint Eugene left us in his writings. As we know, when the Congregation was approved by Pope Leo XII, Eugene summed up his sentiments with a call that still rings in our ears: in the name of God, be saints!

I confess that one of the things that fills me with the greatest joy is when I hear someone speak of an Oblate who is or was a saint. How many saints we have known! How many Oblates belong to that community of saints in heaven! We are grateful to God that in our ranks there are a good number of Oblates who have been declared saints or blessed, no less than thirty-one, joined by two lay people who have joined our family in the most sublime way, sharing in martyrdom. Others are on the way. I like to contemplate the members of our family among that multitude who have washed and made their robes white in the blood of the Lamb, of which the first reading speaks. They are like a powerful magnet that stimulates our hope that we may one day be part of the heavenly Oblate community of which the Founder spoke.

In the name of God, be saint! For the Founder, faithfully living the CC and RR was the sure path to holiness. Today, C. 163 tells us that these norms set out a privileged means for each Oblate to follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ and allow each oblate to evaluate the quality of his response to his vocation and to become a saint. To be holy Oblates, we must live our lives as a response to the call to be like Jesus and to preach, like Jesus, the Gospel to the poorest. We do this by following a path that has been confirmed by the Church and is expressed in our CC and RR. A path that those who have gone before us have followed, and with their witness they tell us that it is possible to become saints by joyfully living our charism. The fruits we hope for from the celebration of our bicentennial are precisely that each one of us may be renewed in our oblation to become the holy religious and missionary that the Founder dreamed of.

To be saint is to proclaim the Gospel with our lives. Today we heard the program that Jesus proposes for being saints: the Beatitudes. In them, we are invited to conversion, to change our worldly mentality to open ourselves to seeing all things as God sees them. It is a path of transformation to become another Christ. We know that we are already children of God, but God wants more. He wants us to be like Him. He wants us to learn to love as He loves. To achieve this, as missionaries, we must learn to be poor with the poor, to weep with those who weep, to be meek and thirst and hunger for justice, to be merciful, to have a pure heart, to work for peace. Do we believe this is the path to true happiness? We know that following this path comes at a price: the risk of being persecuted and insulted for the sake of justice, for the sake of Jesus. To live in hope is to believe that if we live the Beatitudes we will be happy. If we live them radically, we will be radically happy. Do we accept the challenge?

“Everyone who has this hope in Him purifies themselves, just as He is pure,” we heard in the second reading. This tells us that we are pilgrims, that we have not yet reached the goal. We cannot make this journey alone; we must journey together, helping one another to purify ourselves and believe. The goal of our communities is that we can help one another to be saint, to live our vocation with joy. C.11 shows us the path we must travel together as religious and missionaries: “Our mission is to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to seek it before all else. We fulfil this mission in community; and our communities are a sign that, in Jesus, God is everything for us. Together we await Christ’s coming in the fullness of his justice so that God may be all in all. Growing in faith, hope and love, we commit ourselves to be a leaven of the Beatitudes at the heart of the world.”

In the name of God, be saint! Our Lady of the Smile, who always presides over our prayer in the chapel of the Generalate, is inviting us not to be afraid, not to doubt that we can achieve complete happiness if we respond with determination and perseverance to the call to holiness. Our saints and blesseds of the charismatic family illuminate our path and intercede for us. Let us not be afraid to live the Gospel radically like them! Let us not be afraid to be missionaries of the poor in apostolic communities! Let us not be afraid to journey, growing in faith, hope, and charity! Let us not be afraid to be the leaven of the Beatitudes in the heart of the world! Let us not be afraid to be saints!

Luis Ignacio ROIS ALONSO, OMI
Superior General.