On the occasion of the Sunday of the Romanian Saints, Bishop Ioan Casian was present among the faithful of the Diocesan Cathedral of Canada.

The Sunday of the Romanian Saints - said the hierarch of Canada - prolongs the experience of the Sunday of All Saints and specifies it by those who have been sanctified on the territory of Romania. There are many saints who have been known on the territory of Romania over the centuries: the hierarchs Bretanion, Ephraim and Calinic, the metropolitans Dosoftei, Varlaam and Antim, the martyrs Epictet and Astion, the saints Vasile from Poiana Marului, Paisie Velicikovski, Paraschiva and Teodora of Sihla, the Brâncoveanu saints, the Transylvanian metropolitans Ilie, Simion and Sava and others.

We can see that here, on the North American continent, we have local saints too - Herman of Alaska, Rafael of Brooklyn, Ioan Maximovici and Nicholas Velimirovici.

The saints are guiding points for us in order to follow a Christian life today.

There are countless models of life that are proposed to us today. The teaching that guides the life of a Christian is resulting from the Holy Scriptures and from the inspiration of the grace of the Holy Spirit exemplified in the lives of the saints. Scripture and life inspired by the Holy Spirit are fundamental criteria that the true Christian must use in personal life choices. They bring serenity, limpidity and clarity to personal choices. They progressively set the life of the one who practices them in the likeness to that shown by God through His Son. The life of the one who truly considers them becomes one not of the simple secular experience but one that is similar to the one intended by God from eternity for man.

There is a hierarchy of values ​​- continued His Grace Ioan Casian - which generates a hierarchical structure necessary for any society that wants to be healthy. The Church has its hierarchy of Christian values ​​- love, goodness, good understanding, mercy, good deed, and so on. They help building the community and the society on these values ​​without which anarchy, selfishness, hatred, war and violence establish and become the criteria of people's gestures or of a dysfunctional ‘mode of functioning’

The saints are lights in this way towards God and towards our neighbor. They are our path on the way to get nearer to God and to our neighbor.

At the end Bishop Ioan Casian blessed the faithful.