Salve, Regina, Mater Misericordiae.
Salve by today, the Feast of All Saints of the Seraphic Order, the Franciscan Order,
the order springing, of course, from the person of St. Francis, his call, his vocation.
Our Lord called him, Our Lady called him to found this community and to be the father of many saints.
And certainly that has happened, and Our Lord had promised through St. Francis
that the Franciscan Order would last to the end of the world,
continually producing saints.
It's for the church, to build up the church in the time of the 13th century,
when the church was decaying in many ways.
And we could say it's decaying throughout the centuries,
and it has to continually be upheld by religious, in particular,
as Our Lord has revealed to, I think it was St. Gertrude, saying,
if it wasn't for religious, the world wouldn't survive.
Religious are certainly the pillars of the church, the pillars of the world,
because they dedicate themselves to Our Lord.
As Our Lord says,
there is one thing more you must do.
Go and sell what you have and give to the poor.
Then you will have treasure in heaven.
After that, come and follow me.
Come and follow me.
Give your life in my service.
And this is what we,
what we do in the Franciscan order as Franciscans.
We have sold everything to give to the poor,
and then to come and follow Jesus with our entire self.
This is what we do to become saints.
What do you, how do I become a saint?
One pattern certainly is the Franciscan order to become a saint.
Just enter the order.
You know, in a certain sense, all you have to do is enter the order,
Franciscans, and you become holy automatically by living the life.
If you come across somebody on the streets or somebody you know,
and you ask them, do you pray five or six hours a day?
Do you pray three or four rosaries a day?
Do you make an hour of meditation per day?
Do you spend all your free time doing apostolate work or preaching or praying?
Do you live a life of penance and poverty and live under obedience to someone else?
Do you do all these things?
If you, if the answer is yes, you say, well, that person's pretty holy.
But that's true for every Franciscan.
It's true for every Franciscan who lives the life.
You can say they're automatically holy.
And because it's a holy life, to do these things is a holy thing.
And that's the Franciscan order.
The Franciscan life is a pattern of holiness.
It's a mold of holiness, a mold that will make saints make you holy.
And we're blessed to have this order in the church.
Religious orders, of course, are meant for that, are meant to make us saints, make us holy.
The Franciscan order is certainly that.
And the evidence of that is all the, all the,
any myriad of saints canonized, beatified, servants of God,
the first, second, and third order of St. Francis.
We have a whole book of Franciscan saints that was written for 365 days of the year.
But that's only scratching the surface of the saints that are in the Franciscan order.
You remember the vision of St. John Bosco had to,
to Dominic Salve, I believe, it may have been one of the other visions he had.
God showed him all the, all the myriads of members of holy men of the Salesian order.
There were hundreds of thousands of them going, stretching through the, through the centuries.
And that was, that was a vision of the Salesian order,
one of the largest orders of the church even today, I think.
But we can say the same of the Franciscan order, perhaps more.
Perhaps many more, to the end of the world.
And we hope to be one of them, those of us associated with the Franciscan order.
We hope to be one of those saints, to follow this pattern.
All it requires is fidelity, fidelity to the Franciscan ideal, the Franciscan life.
Follow it faithfully, not partially, not for the most part, but perfectly, as perfectly as we can.
And to adopt the means that are present in the Franciscan order to become a saint.
The means that we have, you know, this, we can describe the Franciscan order with a,
with a bunch of P's. Prayer, penance, poverty, perseverance, our devotion to Our Lady and
her property and possession. These, all these P's of perseverance and preaching,
that we do, to imitate the life of Jesus, a life of contemplative, active life.
Prayer and preaching, to bring the teachings of Jesus to the world,
to our example first, and then our preaching.
And to do it to the end of our life, following the example of Jesus and Mary,
following the example of Saint Francis, this perfect model,
we can say, of imitation of Jesus, shown in the stigmata that he had,
showed a seal of our Lord's approval of his way of life.
So let us, let us do, let us copy the example of Saint Francis,
copy the example of Jesus, and follow this way of life faithfully.
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