This Sunday we see a liturgical oddity. All Souls Day falls on a Sunday, which means that we will see black vestments and we celebrate a “Requiem Mass.” A “Requiem Mass” is a Mass for the dead. (A funeral is a special type of Requiem Mass.) For centuries, the Church would move All Souls Day to Monday if it fell on a Sunday, because it did not seem appropriate to celebrate a Mass for the Dead on Sunday, the Day of the Resurrection. When Pope St. Paul VI reformed the General Roman Calendar in 1969, this changed and we began to celebrate All Souls Day on November 2, even if it did fall on a Sunday.
I will avoid getting too deep into Liturgy Calendar trivia and Church History here, because I wanted to take this opportunity to discuss the feast day itself. Celebrating All Souls Day on Sunday gives us a unique opportunity to witness how the Church prays for the dead. There are two major themes woven throughout Masses for the Dead: (1) the death of the person and the necessity to pray for their salvation and (2) the promise of the Resurrection and eternal life with God. I will briefly outline the importance of remembering each of these themes, in the hope that it will help you understand this important commemoration in the Church’s calendar a little better.
On All Souls Day, at every Requiem Mass, and especially at the Funeral Mass, the Church reminds us to pray for the souls of the faithful departed. Death, as the Church understands it, is when a person’s soul is separated from their body. This might sound simple, but it is a completely unnatural sort of thing. For human beings, our soul and our body made to be inseparable. It follows that when they are separated, we experience a sort of suffering that we have never experienced before. I sometimes wonder if it is like the experience of a phantom limb that some have after losing a leg or a finger, but how strange that would be to have this for your entire body! Anyhow, because of this unnatural state of existence–which we only survive due to the goodness of God–and a few other things, we are unable to change after death. We have made all the choices we are going to make; we have done all that we are going to do. But this leads to two issues: (1) many of us have some residue in our lives from the sins we have committed and (2) some of us persist in turning away from God. In the second case, this is how a person finds themselves separated from God for eternity and there is, sadly, nothing we can do for them: it was their choice, and God will not force himself on somebody. In the first case, though, the person must be assisted by the prayers of us who remain on Earth. During this time of cleansing, which we call purgatory, those souls learn to conquer anything that remains of sin by utter and complete dependence on both God and the kindness of other human beings.
But if we focus too much on the necessity of prayers for the dead, we lose sight of something incredibly important: WE HAVE BEEN SAVED! God came into this world, clothed in human flesh, and he conquered the powers of Sin and Death so that we could live in freedom! He then invited us to join him in eternal life as members of his Body and as his brothers and sisters. We may have to do battle with sin daily, and we may have to place our fears at the feet of our Savior daily, but as long as we never give up, as long as we put our faith in God, we remember that Christ said, “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” (Jn 10:10) He told us that in his Father’s house, many places are prepared, and there is one for us if we choose to follow him. “If there were not, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you?” (Jn 14:2) St. Peter teaches us that God “is patient with you, not wishing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.” (2 Pt 3:9) St. Paul reminds us that Death has lost the fight against our God and Savior who loves us more than life, exclaiming: “Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Cor 15:44-45)
Today, let us pray for the dead. Let us also remember that God has won, and we are invited to join him in his Resurrection.