Commemorating the departed

On All Saints Day, November 1, the Catholic Church joyfully celebrates the communion of saints and human salvation and invites Christians to contemplate the "holy city, the heavenly Jerusalem, our mother" (Preface, All Saints).

Today, November 2, members of the Church are invited to commemorate all of the faithful departed who have "gone before us marked with the sign of faith and... who sleep in Christ" (Eucharistic Prayer I).

The Church has always encouraged prayers that the deceased may be received into heaven. However, it was only in the second millennium of Western Christianity that a special liturgical day was declared in the interest of the Poor Souls.

The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed was established by St Odilo, fifth Benedictine Abbot of Cluny, around 1030. On the day after the feast of All Saints, St Odilo used to urge his monks to say special prayers for all the dead, thus mysteriously contributing to their entry into beatitude. Starting this as an observance for the monks of Cluny and all the other communities in the Cluniac family, he required them, on the day following All Saints, to pray for deceased monks. He later strongly exhorted all the monasteries under his jurisdiction to devote this date each year to Masses, acts of self-denial and almsgiving on behalf of the souls in purgatory.

The custom of solemnly interceding for the dead in a celebration which St Odilo called All Souls Day gradually continued to spread and is now the practice throughout the universal Church. The practice soon grew into the custom of saying three Masses for the souls in purgatory. Eventually, the Holy See officially extended it to the whole Church in 1748. After World War I, it developed into a universal observance, with one Mass being said for a particular person or group, one for all the dead and one for the Pope's intentions.

"It is very important that we Christians live a relationship of the truth of the faith with the deceased and that we view death and the afterlife in the light of Revelation. Already, the Apostle Paul, writing to the first communities, exhorted the faithful to 'not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since', he wrote, 'we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep' (1 Thes 4:13-14). Today too, it is necessary to evangelise about the reality of death and eternal life, realities particularly subject to superstitious beliefs and syncretisms, so that the Christian truth does not risk mixing itself with myths of various types," said Pope Benedict XVI on All Souls Day 2008.

In his Encyclical on Christian hope, Pope Benedict questioned himself about the mystery of eternal life (Spe salvi, 10-12). He asked himself: "Is the Christian faith a hope that transforms and sustains the lives of people still today?" And more radically: "Do men and women of our time still long for eternal life? Or has earthly existence perhaps become their only horizon?"

"In reality", said the Holy Father in November 2008, "as St Augustine had already observed, all of us want a 'blessed life', happiness. We rarely know what it is like or how it will be, but we feel attracted to it. This is a universal hope, common to men and women of all times and all places. The expression 'eternal life' aims to give a name to this irrepressible longing; it is not an unending succession of days but an immersion of oneself in the ocean of infinite love, in which time, before and after, no longer exists. A fullness of life and of joy: it is this that we hope and await from our being with Christ."

On All Souls Day, Christians renew the hope in eternal life, truly founded on Christ's death and Resurrection. "I am risen and I am with you always," the Lord tells us.

In praying for the dead, the Church, above all, contemplates the mystery of the Resurrection of Christ, who obtains salvation and eternal life for us through his Cross.

The Lord's Cross reminds us that all life is illumined by the light of Easter and that no situation is totally lost for Christ conquered death and opened the way for us to true life. Redemption "is brought about in the sacrifice of Christ, by which man redeems the debt of sin and is reconciled to God" (Tertio millennio adveniente, n. 7).

This Christian hope is not solely individual. It is also always a hope for others. Our lives are profoundly linked, one to the other, and the good and the bad that each of us does always affects others too. Hence, the prayer of a pilgrim soul in the world can help another soul that is being purified after death.

This is why the Church invites us, on November 2, to pray for our beloved deceased and to pause at their tombs in the cemeteries.