All Souls' Day

 

Around the end of the first millennium, as a sort of sequel to yesterday's celebration of All Saints' Day, the Church added All Souls' Day on November 2, a day devoted to urgent prayer on behalf of all who, having died, are now still being purified from the consequences of their sins.

In his 2013 book Mercy: the Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life, Walter Cardinal Kasper called the doctrine of purgatory "a sign of this infinite mercy and forbearance of God for those who have not fundamentally and decisively decided against him.  ... Ultimately, it is the condition that results from encountering our holy God and the fire of his purifying love, which can only passively endure and through which we become altogether prepared for full communion with God. ... At the same time, it offers the community of the faithful the possibility, in solidarity, to intercede for the deceased before God."

Here in the northern hemisphere, thoughts about the end come quite naturally at this time of the year, as the sun rises a little later every morning and sets a little earlier every afternoon. Amidst withered leaves and barren branches, there is a melancholy sense of time passing by as yet another year draws to a close. The universe, as we know it, did not always exist and will not always exist. However distant the day, the world we know is doomed to end. Less distant, there is the individual - but no less definite - death of each one of us. Our human condition of alienation from God through sin makes mortality seem the ultimate frustration. Perhaps, that may help to explain modern secular society’s increasing inclination to downplay death, even to the point of failing to provide complete religious funerals for the deceased. 

As I age, I often find myself checking obituary notices to keep track of people I have known - classmates, professional colleagues, personal friends, former parishioners. In the process, I have increasingly been surprised by how many obituaries, instead of concluding with the customary notice of a funeral service in a church or a traditional wake, instead often end with some brief reference to a graveside service or perhaps not even that, or maybe something curiously called a "celebration of life" at some pub or other such strange location.

In contrast, in the Church’s calendar, both the month of November and the season of Advent, which immediately follows it, have traditionally focused on our end, as an inevitability which we humanly fear, but for which we wait with the hope made possible for us by Christ. Christian hope causes one both to treat all of life as a preparation for a good death and not to neglect the duty of prayer for those who have gone before us. Hence, how we think and speak about Christian hope regarding the end and the eternal fulfillment of God’s purpose for creation is fundamental for a coherent Christian faith.

Yet, as Karl Rahner already observed some 80 years ago in Theological Investigations: "Most contemporary Christians have already ceased to have any sense of being actively in communication with their own dead, the members of their family and the relations whom they have lost. ... They are forgotten, and in so far as they are thought of at all attention is focused upon their lives while they were still among us and not in any true sense upon the fact that they are still living." 

While very much a reflection of our contemporary alienation, our modern neglect of the Church's tradition of prayers for the dead may not be entirely unique to today at least in America. Thus, in his first Pastoral Letter  (May 28, 1792), the first U.S. Bishop, Archbishop John Carroll, already found it necessary to admonish U.S. Catholics: "Follow your departed brethren into the regions of eternity, with your prayers, and all the assistance, which is suggested by the principles of faith and piety."

The almost unthinking resort in the pre-conciliar liturgical practice to the Requiem Mass on ferial days with multiple options - an unfortunately overdone practice which I can well remember - may have distorted the place of prayer for the dead in the liturgy and, by extension, may have undermined the salience of the doctrine of the communion of saints in practice. That said, all those Requiem Masses focused on praying for the souls in purgatory probably did at least help sustain a real relationship between the living and the dead, even as the changing conditions of modern society were increasingly undermining that relationship.

As Saint Augustine told his congregation: "the dead can be helped by the prayers of holy Church, and the eucharistic sacrifice, and alms distributed for the repose of their spirits; so that God may deal with them more mercifully than their sins have deserved" [Sermon 172, 2; tr. Edmund Hill]. Or, as Dante expressed it in the hopeful words of the soul of Manfredi, grandson of the Empress Constanza, in the last line of Purgatorio, Canto 3 : "For those on earth can much advance us here" che' qui per quei di là molto s'avanza.

The great autumn triduum of Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls challenges us to face our fears and contemplate the mystery of death – but to do so in faith and hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep [1 Thessalonians 4:14].

Photo: Calvary Catholic Cemetery, Knoxville TN.