In Commemoratione Omnium Fidelium Defunctorum — on the second day of November, I classis
Miseremini mei, miseremini mei, saltem vos amici mei, quia manus Domini tetigit me. “Have pity on me, have pity on me, at least you my friends, because the hand of the Lord hath touched me.” — Job 19:21, from the Office of the Dead
I. A day for those who cannot help themselves
Yesterday the Church looked up and rejoiced with those who have reached home. Today she looks down the road at those still walking it. All Saints and All Souls are not two feasts that happen to sit side by side. They are one act of charity in two movements: first we ask the saints to help us, and then we turn and help those who can no longer help themselves.
Like yesterday’s entry, this one has no single life to tell. Its subject is the Church Suffering as such: who the holy souls are, what Scripture says of them, what the Church has solemnly taught about their state, how Christians have prayed for them from the first centuries, how one abbot of Cluny gave them a day of their own, and what the saints have learned about them in prayer. As in every entry, what is defined is kept distinct from what is reliably reported, and both from what pious tradition has handed down. On this subject that discipline matters more than usual. Few doctrines have gathered more legend around them than Purgatory, and few have been more often attacked by way of those legends.
II. Who are the holy souls?
The holy souls are those who died in the grace of God, and are therefore certain of heaven, but who were not yet wholly pure when they died. They are saved. They cannot sin again, cannot lose God, and cannot fall into hell. What remains in them is the residue of sin: the temporal punishment still owed for sins already forgiven, and the venial faults and disordered attachments not yet burned away. Nothing defiled can enter the presence of God (Apoc. 21:27). So before they see Him, they are made clean.
The Catechism of the Council of Trent calls this the purgatorial fire, purgatorius ignis, in which the souls of the just are cleansed by a punishment of fixed duration so that entrance may be opened to them into their eternal country. Three things follow from that description, and each corrects a common mistake.
First, Purgatory is not a second chance. Nothing is decided there. The particular judgment has already been made, and the soul belongs to God for ever. Second, Purgatory is not a lesser hell. Hell is the loss of God; Purgatory is the last approach to Him. Its pain is real, but it is the pain of a soul that wants God more than anything and cannot yet have Him. Third, Purgatory is not permanent. It ends, and when it ends for each soul, that soul joins the multitude we honoured yesterday.
The holy souls have one more condition that defines this day. They can no longer merit. The time for earning was the time of life on earth. They suffer, and their suffering purifies them, but they cannot shorten it by anything they do. They depend on us. That is why the Church calls them holy and why she calls us their friends.
III. The testimony of Scripture
The prayer of Judas Machabeus. After a battle, Judas found that the fallen Jewish soldiers had been wearing amulets taken from the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbade. He did not conclude that they were lost. He took up a collection of twelve thousand drachms of silver and sent it to Jerusalem “for sacrifice to be offered for the sins of the dead, thinking well and religiously concerning the resurrection.” The sacred writer adds his own judgment: Sancta ergo et salubris est cogitatio pro defunctis exorare, ut a peccatis solvantur. “It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins” (2 Mach. 12:43-46). The passage assumes three things: that some of the dead can still be loosed from sin, that the living can help them, and that sacrifice is the chief way to do so. The Reformers’ rejection of the Books of Machabees from the canon was bound up with exactly this text. The Council of Trent confirmed them as Scripture.
Saved, yet so as by fire. St. Paul compares the work of Christian teachers to buildings raised on the one foundation, which is Christ. Some build with gold, silver and precious stones, others with wood, hay and stubble. “The day of the Lord shall declare it, because it shall be revealed in fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work, of what sort it is.” The man whose work survives will be rewarded. “If any man’s work burn, he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire” (1 Cor. 3:13-15). The Latin Fathers and the scholastics read this as a description of the purifying fire after death, through which a soul is saved but suffers loss. St. Augustine was more cautious and offered several readings, but he held the conclusion as not incredible and the Church’s later teaching followed it.
Not in this world nor in the world to come. Our Lord says that blasphemy against the Holy Ghost “shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in the world to come” (Matt. 12:32). St. Gregory the Great drew the inference plainly: the saying implies that some sins can be forgiven in the world to come, and these must be lesser faults (Dialogi IV.41).
Until thou pay the last farthing. “Amen I say to thee, thou shalt not go out from thence till thou repay the last farthing” (Matt. 5:26). Tertullian and others read the prison in this parable as a place of purification from which there is a way out once the debt is paid.
Prayer for a friend in Christ. St. Paul, writing to Timothy, prays for the household of Onesiphorus, and then for Onesiphorus himself: “The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day” (2 Tim. 1:16-18). The greeting is to his house, not to him, and many commentators have concluded that he had already died. If so, the Apostle is praying for the dead.
These texts are not all equally strong. The passage from Machabees is the clearest witness to prayer for the dead; St. Paul’s fire and Our Lord’s words in St. Matthew are the classic witnesses to purification after death as the Church has read them. None of them stands alone. They are read inside the Church’s practice, which is older than any of the New Testament books were in written form.
IV. What the Church teaches
The Church’s defined teaching on Purgatory is short, and it is worth knowing exactly what it contains.
Lyons and Florence. The Second Council of Lyons in 1274 received the profession of faith of the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus, which states that those who die in charity before having made satisfaction by worthy fruits of penance are purified after death by purgatorial or cleansing punishments, and that the suffrages of the living faithful, namely Masses, prayers, almsgiving and other works of piety, profit them in relieving these punishments (Denzinger 856). The Council of Florence repeated the same teaching in the decree of union with the Greeks, Lætentur cæli, in 1439 (Denzinger 1304). Both texts were written for reunion with the East, and both are careful. They speak of purifying punishments. They do not define a place, a duration or the nature of the fire.
Trent. Against the Reformers, the Council of Trent taught that the guilt of sin is forgiven in justification, but not always the whole debt of temporal punishment, which must be paid either in this life or in Purgatory before heaven is opened (Sess. VI, canon 30). It taught that the Mass is rightly offered for the living and for the dead (Sess. XXII, chapter 2 and canon 3). And in its final session in 1563, in a decree of only a few lines, it taught that there is a Purgatory and that the souls detained there are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, above all by the acceptable Sacrifice of the altar (Sess. XXV, decree on Purgatory). In the same decree the Council ordered bishops to keep the more difficult and subtle questions, which do not edify, out of popular preaching, and to forbid anything uncertain or bordering on falsehood, and anything that served curiosity, superstition or base gain.
That last instruction is part of the doctrine’s history. The Council knew that legends, extravagant visions and the trade in indulgences had damaged the Church’s credibility on exactly this point. Its answer was to keep the dogma and prune the growth around it. What is of faith is this: Purgatory exists; the souls there are purified; and our prayers, works and above all the Mass help them. The location, the length of time, and whether the fire is material are not defined. The Latin tradition has commonly held that the fire is real, and St. Thomas teaches so; the Church has not imposed it as dogma.
What helps them. Every Catholic can help the holy souls. The Church names the suffrages: the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, prayer, almsgiving, fasting and other works of penance, and indulgences applied to the dead. St. Thomas explains why this works. The members of the Church are one Body, and charity makes the good of one member flow to another, so that satisfaction offered by one can be accepted for another (Summa Theologiae, Suppl., q. 71). St. Augustine adds the boundary: these helps profit only those who, while they lived, made themselves fit to be helped by them, that is, those who died in grace (Enchiridion 110). Prayer cannot draw a soul out of hell. It can hasten a soul in Purgatory into heaven.
V. The prayer of the first Christians
Long before there was a feast, the Christians prayed for their dead.
Stones. Around the end of the second century, Abercius, Bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, composed his own epitaph. The stone was found in 1883, and a fragment of it is now in the Vatican Museums. In veiled language it speaks of the Fish from the spring, caught by a pure Virgin, given to friends to eat with wine and bread. It ends by asking every fellow believer who reads it to pray for Abercius. The catacombs of Rome are full of shorter versions of the same request: in pace, “in peace”; vivas in Deo, “mayest thou live in God”; refrigera, “be refreshed.” The early Christians did not write prayers on graves for people they believed needed nothing.
Perpetua’s brother. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, written at Carthage around 203 and containing Perpetua’s own prison diary, records that while she awaited martyrdom she saw in a vision her little brother Dinocrates, who had died of a cancer of the face at seven years old. He was hot and thirsty, his wound still on him, unable to reach the water of a pool whose rim was too high. Perpetua prayed for him day and night. In a second vision she saw him clean and refreshed, the wound healed, drinking from a golden bowl that never emptied, and then going off to play as children do. “Then I understood,” she writes, “that he had been released from his punishment” (Passio 7-8). The text is not a definition of doctrine, and the Church has never treated it as one. But it shows a young mother, a catechumen until shortly before, assuming without any argument that her prayer could help a dead child.
Tertullian, Cyril, Monica. Tertullian, writing around the same time, lists oblations for the dead on their anniversaries among the customs handed down by tradition (De corona 3), and he speaks of a widow who prays for her husband’s soul and has the Sacrifice offered on the anniversary of his death (De monogamia 10). St. Cyril of Jerusalem in the fourth century teaches the newly baptised that at the Eucharist the Church prays for all who have fallen asleep before us, believing it the greatest help to those souls (Catecheses mystagogicæ 5.9). St. Monica, dying at Ostia, asked only that her sons remember her at the altar of the Lord wherever they might be, and St. Augustine, who records the request, ends that book of the Confessions by asking his readers to remember her and his father at the altar too (Confessiones IX.11-13).
Augustine on the care of the dead. Late in life St. Augustine received a question from St. Paulinus of Nola. A widow had asked that her son be buried near the shrine of St. Felix; did burial beside a saint help the dead? Augustine’s answer, On the Care to Be Had for the Dead, is the classic treatment of the question. The place of burial, he wrote, does not help the soul in itself, though the funeral rites are fitting because the body is part of the man and will rise. What helps the soul is the prayer of the Church, the offering of the Sacrifice and almsgiving, which are made for all the dead together in the general commemoration, even for those who have no one of their own to pray for them. The tomb near a martyr helps chiefly by reminding the living to pray (De cura pro mortuis gerenda 4, 6). In that last phrase is the seed of this day.
VI. How the commemoration came to be
Before Cluny. For centuries the dead were remembered every day in the Memento of the Canon, and individually on the third, seventh and thirtieth days after death and on the anniversary. Monasteries kept their own days for their departed brethren. St. Isidore of Seville, in his rule for monks in the early seventh century, prescribed a Sacrifice for the dead on the day after Pentecost. In Carolingian times monasteries and cathedrals formed confraternities of prayer, exchanging lists of their dead and promising Masses for one another.
St. Odilo. The universal commemoration came from Cluny. St. Odilo was born around 962 into a noble family of the Auvergne, entered Cluny as a young man, and was its abbot for more than fifty years, until his death in 1049. He was small, gentle and ascetic, and he was famous above all for mercy. In a famine he melted down the sacred vessels of the abbey to feed the poor. He promoted the Truce of God, which forbade fighting on certain days of the week and seasons of the year. He was said to have remarked that if he must be damned, he would rather be damned for too much mercy than for too much severity.
Around the year 998, Odilo issued a statute for Cluny and all the houses subject to it. On 1 November, after Vespers of All Saints, the bells were to be tolled and the Office of the Dead chanted; on the following day every priest was to celebrate Mass for all the faithful departed, and alms were to be given to the poor, as they were on Maundy Thursday. The text of the statute survives, and its date is the one point in the story that is not entirely certain: most historians place it around 998, some as late as 1030. The substance is Tier 1. The day after All Saints was chosen on purpose. The Church would honour first those who had reached glory and then pray at once for those still being prepared for it.
The hermit’s island. Jotsald, a monk of Cluny who wrote Odilo’s life shortly after his death, tells a story about the origin of the statute, and St. Peter Damian repeats it. A pilgrim returning from Jerusalem was shipwrecked on a small island off Sicily, where he met a hermit. The hermit told him that near the island were openings in the rock through which the cries of souls in torment could be heard, and that he often heard the demons complaining that the prayers and alms of the monks of Cluny were snatching souls out of their hands. He begged the pilgrim to go to Cluny and urge the abbot to pray even more. When Odilo heard the story, he instituted the commemoration. This is a pious legend, and it is told here as one. It belongs to Tier 3. What it shows, if it shows anything, is how Cluny’s contemporaries understood the abbey’s vocation: a great engine of prayer working for the dead.
From Cluny to Rome. Cluny in the eleventh century had more than a thousand dependent houses, and through them the observance spread across France, England, Spain, Germany and Italy. Bishops adopted it for their dioceses. By the fourteenth century it was kept in Rome itself, and from there it passed into the Roman Missal and Breviary for the whole Latin Church.
Three Masses, and the Great War. The privilege of three Masses on this day began with the Dominicans of Valencia in the fifteenth century. Pope Benedict XIV extended it in 1748 to all priests in Spain and Portugal and their dominions. On 10 August 1915, with Europe at war and the dead counted in the hundreds of thousands, Pope Benedict XV extended it to every priest in the world by the apostolic constitution Incruentum altaris, “the unbloody Sacrifice of the altar.” He gave two reasons. The war was filling the earth with the dead. And across Europe, the confiscation of Church property over the previous century had swept away countless pious foundations, so that Masses which the faithful had endowed for their souls were no longer being said. The Church would make up the debt. One Mass may be offered for any intention, one is offered for all the faithful departed, and one for the intention of the Pope.
In the 1962 Missal. All Souls is a day of the first class. When 2 November falls on a Sunday it is transferred to the Monday, but this year it falls on its own day. The vestments are black. The three Masses each have their own Epistle, Gospel and orations, and each carries the Dies iræ.
VII. The saints on Purgatory
St. Augustine gave the Latin Church its sober framework. Some, he wrote, suffer temporal punishments in this life only, some after death, some both, but all before the last and strictest judgment (De civitate Dei XXI.13). He thought it not incredible that some of the faithful are saved by a purifying fire after this life, more slowly or more quickly according as they loved perishing goods more or less (Enchiridion 69). And he insisted that prayer for the dead belonged to the whole Church, not to the private devotion of a few (Sermo 172).
St. Gregory the Great taught that for certain light faults there must be believed to be a purging fire before the judgment, and gave the classic examples: constant idle talk, immoderate laughter, excessive care for one’s property, and the errors of ignorance in small matters (Dialogi IV.41). His Dialogues also contain the story of the monk Justus and the thirty Masses, and other accounts of souls appearing to ask for prayer. These stories shaped medieval devotion more than any treatise. They should be read as Gregory meant them: as edifying narratives that illustrate a doctrine, not as proofs of it.
St. Thomas Aquinas treated Purgatory in a short work that his disciples later placed in the appendix to the Supplement of the Summa. He taught that the least pain of Purgatory exceeds the greatest pain of this life, because the soul’s desire for God, once freed from the distractions of the body, is immensely stronger, and its delay is felt accordingly. He also taught that the souls suffer willingly, knowing that their suffering is just and that it leads to God.
St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510), a married laywoman who spent her life nursing the sick in the great hospital of Genoa, wrote nothing herself, but her disciples recorded her teaching in the Treatise on Purgatory. Its central claim is surprising. The souls in Purgatory, she said, suffer pain beyond any earthly pain, and at the same time a joy beyond any earthly joy except that of the saints in heaven. Their joy grows as the rust of sin is burned away and more of God’s light reaches them, as an object covered over becomes visible as the covering is removed. They would not want to leave Purgatory before they are clean, because they see that to appear before God stained would be a greater pain than any fire. Purgatory, in her teaching, is the work of God’s love on a soul that already loves Him back. The Church has commended her doctrine. It is the best antidote to the image of Purgatory as a prison run by an angry God.
St. Robert Bellarmine, the great controversialist of the Counter-Reformation, devoted a whole book of his Controversies to Purgatory, defending it from Scripture and the Fathers against the Reformers. He also preached that the souls, once released, pray for those who helped them, so that charity to the dead returns to the living.
VIII. East and West
The Churches of the East have always prayed for their dead. The Byzantine liturgy remembers them at every Divine Liturgy, and the Orthodox keep several Soul Saturdays in the year, most notably the Saturday before the Sunday of the Last Judgment, before Lent, and the Saturday before Pentecost. Memorial services are held on the third, ninth and fortieth days after a death and on the anniversary.
What divided East and West at Florence was not whether to pray for the dead, but how to speak about their state. St. Mark of Ephesus, the leader of the Greek opposition, objected to the Latin language of a purifying material fire and of satisfaction paid through punishment. He held that the souls of the imperfect are helped by the Church’s prayers, but in terms of a growth into God rather than a penal process. The Council’s decree was drafted with that objection in view, which is why it speaks of purifying punishments and says nothing of fire. On the practice itself, Rome and Constantinople have never disagreed.
IX. What the day teaches
That God’s mercy and His justice are not rivals. Purgatory is mercy, because it saves souls that would otherwise be unfit for heaven. It is justice, because sin leaves debts that love does not simply ignore. The two meet in the fire, which is God’s love purifying what it has already saved.
That death does not end the duties of charity. The holy souls are our neighbours. Many of them are our own parents, grandparents, friends and benefactors. To canonize our dead at their funerals and then never pray for them again is not kindness. It may leave them without help they badly need.
That the time for merit is now. The holy souls cannot merit. We still can. Every day of life is a chance to pay our own debts by penance, to make our own Purgatory short, and to store up help for others. The best way to prepare for one’s own death is to pray for the dead.
That the Church is one family across death. Yesterday the saints prayed for us. Today we pray for the souls. Tomorrow, when they reach heaven, those souls will pray for us. Charity moves in a circle through all three conditions of the one Body of Christ, and none of its members is ever left alone.
Practice
Examine. Whom have I forgotten among my dead? Did I assume a loved one went straight to heaven and so stop praying for him? Do I make light of venial sin, as though it has no cost? Am I storing up a long Purgatory for myself by habits I could correct today? Have I made provision, in my will or by asking my family, for Masses to be offered for my own soul?
Do. Have a Mass offered today or this week for your deceased family, and one for the souls who have no one to pray for them. Visit a cemetery during the first eight days of November and pray there for the dead; under the present discipline this gains a plenary indulgence applicable to the souls in Purgatory, under the usual conditions. Write the names of your dead on a list and keep it in your missal or prayer book, to be read at every Mass you attend. Consider the Heroic Act of Charity, approved by Pope Benedict XIII, by which one offers all one’s satisfactory works and all the suffrages one will receive after death for the holy souls, leaving their application to Our Lady.
Pray. The Collect of the first Mass:
Fidelium, Deus, omnium conditor et redemptor: animabus famulorum famularumque tuarum remissionem cunctorum tribue peccatorum; ut indulgentiam, quam semper optaverunt, piis supplicationibus consequantur: Qui vivis et regnas cum Deo Patre in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“O God, the Creator and Redeemer of all the faithful, grant to the souls of Thy servants and handmaids the remission of all their sins: that through our devout supplications they may obtain the pardon they have always desired. Who livest and reignest with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
Aspiration. Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. “Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.”
Devote. Pray the De profundis (Ps. 129) tonight for the faithful departed. Through November, add the Requiem æternam after grace at meals and at the end of night prayers. Read St. Catherine of Genoa’s Treatise on Purgatory; it is short, and it will change how you think about death.
If you wish to go deeper: the Theology and Doctrine path takes up the defined doctrine of Purgatory at Lyons, Florence and Trent, the distinction between guilt and temporal punishment, the theology of suffrages and indulgences, and St. Thomas on the pains of Purgatory. The Church History path follows Cluny under St. Odilo, the Truce of God, the Reformation controversy over Purgatory and the canon of Scripture, and Benedict XV’s Incruentum altaris in the shadow of the Great War. The Sacred Liturgy path studies the Office of the Dead, the three Masses of this day, the Dies iræ, and the Absolution at the catafalque. The East-West thread compares the Roman 2 November with the Byzantine Soul Saturdays and the debate between the Latins and St. Mark of Ephesus at Florence. The Lives of the Saints path continues with St. Catherine of Genoa and the mystics of Purgatory.
Requiescant in pace.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; the epitaph of Abercius; the Passio Perpetuæ et Felicitatis 7-8; Tertullian, De corona 3 and De monogamia 10; St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses mystagogicæ 5.9; St. Augustine, Confessiones IX.11-13, De civitate Dei XXI.13, Enchiridion 69 and 110, De cura pro mortuis gerenda*, and* Sermo 172; St. Isidore of Seville, Regula monachorum*; St. Gregory the Great,* Dialogi IV; the statute of St. Odilo on the commemoration of the faithful departed; Jotsald, Vita sancti Odilonis*; St. Peter Damian,* Vita sancti Odilonis*; St. Thomas Aquinas,* Summa Theologiae*, Supplement, q. 71, and the appendix on Purgatory; St. Catherine of Genoa,* Trattato del Purgatorio*; St. Robert Bellarmine,* De Purgatorio*; the Second Council of Lyons (1274), Florence,* Lætentur cæli (1439), and Trent, Sessions VI, XXII and XXV; the Catechism of the Council of Trent*, on the fifth article of the Creed; Benedict XV,* Incruentum altaris (1915); the Roman Martyrology; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907-1912), s.vv. “All Souls’ Day,” “Purgatory,” and “St. Odilo”; Butler’s Lives of the Saints*. The Fathers are given in paraphrase. The date of St. Odilo’s statute is given as commonly held; the story of the hermit’s island is given as legend.*