Pope Leo XIV: Holiness Is a Call for Every Life
On All Saints Day he linked the Beatitudes to daily peace, recalled the Savannah martyrs, and announced an All Souls Mass for the forgotten dead.
On the Solemnity of All Saints, November 1, 2026, Pope Leo XIV addressed pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square, presenting the feast as an invitation to share the joy of the countless saints who made their lives a gift to God and neighbor.
He drew on Revelation 7:9—the vision of a great multitude from every nation—and on the Beatitudes of Matthew 5. Saints, he said, are poor in spirit yet rich in God’s love, meek yet rewarded, peacemakers whom God calls by name, and persecuted yet steadfast in faith and charity.
A Vocation, Not a Privilege
Holiness, the Pope insisted, “is not a privilege reserved for a few” but “a universal vocation that speaks to each of us where we live.” It gives rise to “actions and choices of love that transcend the calculations of greed and the arrogance of evil.” He urged the faithful never to tire of building peace “both in the most important situations and in the ordinary circumstances of everyday life.”
Approximately 25,000 faithful attended the Angelus.
The Holy Father also recalled the beatification celebrated the previous day in Savannah, Georgia, of five Franciscan missionaries killed in 1597. Their witness, he suggested, belongs to the same communion of saints the Church contemplates on this feast: men who answered the call to holiness, even unto the shedding of their blood.
Looking Toward All Souls
Looking ahead, Pope Leo XIV announced that on All Souls’ Day, November 2, he will celebrate Mass at Rome’s Verano Cemetery. There he will pray in a special way for the departed whom no one remembers—those without living relatives or public memorials—entrusting them to the mercy of God and to the prayers of the whole Church.
The Angelus thus joined three threads of Catholic life: the universal call to holiness rooted in the Gospel Beatitudes, the memory of missionary martyrs newly raised to the altars, and concrete prayer for the dead. In the teaching of the Church, the communion of saints unites the faithful on earth with those already in glory and those being purified, making every ordinary choice of peace and charity a participation in that same mystery.
By placing holiness within reach of every state of life and by linking it to the daily work of peace, the Pope’s words on All Saints Day reaffirmed that sanctity is not an elite path but the ordinary Christian vocation lived with fidelity where each person stands.