Pope Leo XIV Says Holiness Is for Everyone at All Saints Angelus November 1 2026

Somewhere in that crowd of about 25,000 people stood a pilgrim nobody would ever name in a newspaper. Pope Leo XIV had that person in mind on Sunday, 1 November 2026, when he spoke from the window of the Apostolic Palace in St Peter's Square. The feast of All Saints, he said, is not only about the saints whose names the Church has written down.

It is also about the countless others, he said, whose good God sees even when no one else does. Vatican News reports that the Pope called holiness a universal vocation, not a privilege for a few, and urged the crowd never to grow weary of fostering peace.

Pope Leo XIV All Saints Angelus 2026 Holiness Message

The Pope drew on the vision in Revelation 7:9, a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, CathNews reports. That multitude, he said, is made of men and women who followed Jesus and made their lives a gift to God and to their neighbours.

Holiness cannot be reduced to any calculation, he explained, because the good the saints spread around them cannot be counted like money or measured like attendance. Vatican News reports that he described the hope-filled message of the feast in plain terms: God sees the good that we do not see, knows stories that we do not know, and reaches hearts to which we have no access.

He then gave the crowd a roadmap from the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, describing the saints as poor in spirit yet rich in God's love, Vatican News reports. Their faces are streaked with tears, yet they find consolation in prayer. They are meek in the face of violence, hungry for justice, ready to forgive, and peacemakers called by name by God.

Those lines landed on a square full of ordinary pilgrims, families, older couples, and young people who had travelled to Rome for the weekend. The Pope was speaking to the life they go home to on Monday morning.

Georgia Martyrs Remembered at St Peter's Square

After the Angelus prayer, Pope Leo recalled the beatification that had taken place the day before in Savannah, Georgia, CathNews reports. Five Franciscan missionaries, Pedro de Corpa and four companions, killed in 1597, had been proclaimed Blessed for dying in hatred of the faith.

Their witness, the Pope suggested, belongs to the same communion of saints the Church contemplated on the feast, CathNews reports. They were men who answered the call to holiness even unto the shedding of their blood, and their story reached across more than four centuries into a Roman square full of people who had never heard their names before that weekend.

The connection was not accidental. The Pope placed the new Blesseds beside the unknown saints, the recognised and the unrecognised, in one family. The event in Savannah had occured the day before, and the memory of it was still fresh when the crowd gathered in Rome, a reminder that holiness keeps breaking into the present from unexpected places.

He also greeted pilgrims from many countries, including Syro-Malabar faithful with their pastors, and mentioned the Youth Olympic Games in Dakar, Senegal, and a Mission with the Poor to be held in Rome from 8 to 15 November.

All Souls Mass at Verano Cemetery for Forgotten Dead

Looking ahead to Monday, 2 November, the Pope announced that he would celebrate Mass at Rome's Verano Cemetery, CathNews reports. There he would 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.

"Holiness is not a privilege reserved for a few, but a universal vocation that speaks to each of us where we live."

The Verano Cemetery is Rome's oldest and largest cemetery, near the Basilica of St Lawrence Outside the Walls, and the Mass was scheduled for 4 p.m. local time. The Pope had celebrated the same feast at the same cemetery the previous year, and the return carried its own quiet message: the dead who are forgotten by the world are not forgotten by the Church.

His final words before the greeting turned back to the living. He asked the faithful to feel united in the communion of saints with the immense family of brothers and sisters who had gone before them on their earthly pilgrimage, and to pray for the departed, especially those whom no one remembers. The crowd that had come to hear about saints went home carrying the names of people nobody else would pray for.

Readers can follow the Savannah story in five Georgia Martyrs beatified in Savannah before about 10000 people, and the wider All Saints weekend in the Philippines marks All Saints Day as Marcos urges devotion to others. The witness of Christians facing violence today is covered in Jordan Christians and Muslims lighting candles together after the Karak church funerals, and the newest American saint in the eight foot St John Neumann statue blessed in Philadelphia.

One pilgrim in that square will go home and light a candle for a name nobody else in the family still mentions. On All Saints Day the Pope said the counting was never the point, and the ones nobody counts are the very ones heaven holds closest.

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.