All Souls

All Souls is not a second All Saints. On November 1 the Church praises God for those who see him. On November 2 she prays for the faithful who have died in grace and are not yet ready for that sight. Catholic doctrine calls this purification purgatory. It is not a second chance for those who died refusing God, and it is not a despairing prison. It is the mercy of God finishing, after death, the healing that repentance began. The Catechism says that those who die in God’s friendship but imperfectly purified undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven. The Church has prayed for the dead from the beginning. Judas Maccabeus had sacrifices offered for the fallen, and the author of 2 Maccabees calls it a holy and pious thought. Augustine prayed for his mother Monica and asked others to remember her at the altar.

The November 2 commemoration took wide monastic form under St. Odilo of Cluny at the end of the tenth century or the beginning of the eleventh, and from Cluny it spread. Rome eventually kept it for the whole Latin Church. When November 2 falls on a Sunday, the commemoration is transferred to November 3, because Sunday, the day of the Resurrection, is not replaced by this memorial of the dead. The vestments are violet or black. The Gloria is not said. The creed is not added. The tone is intercession, not triumph, which is why white, the color of All Saints, is not the color of this day in the Roman Missal.

Benedict XV, in 1915, in the middle of the First World War, allowed every priest to celebrate three Masses on All Souls: one for a particular intention, one for all the faithful departed, and one for the intention of the pope. The permission remains. It is a privilege attached to the scale of the dead, not a suggestion that one Mass is insufficient. A parish that offers one Mass with care has kept the day. A priest who offers three should know why the three intentions differ.

The Manual of Indulgences grants a plenary indulgence, applicable only to the souls in purgatory, to the faithful who visit a cemetery and pray for the dead, even mentally, on each of the days from November 1 through November 8, and to those who on All Souls’ Day visit a church and recite the Our Father and the Creed. The ordinary may transfer that church visit to the preceding or following Sunday or to All Saints. The usual conditions remain: detachment from all sin, confession, Holy Communion, and prayer for the pope’s intentions. One confession can serve several indulgences. Communion and the prayer for the pope are required for each. If the disposition is incomplete, the indulgence is partial. These norms are the ordinary law. A pope sometimes widens the dates for a particular year. The widening is not permanent unless the Holy See says so.

The lectionary offers a set of readings for the dead rather than one fixed triplet: Wisdom 3, “the souls of the just are in the hand of God”; Romans 6 or 8 or 14; and a Gospel of the resurrection, often John 6, “I will raise him on the last day,” or John 11, Lazarus. The preface is the preface of the dead. The prayer “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord” is the Church’s shortest complete theology of the day. It asks rest, light, and, in the longer form, that perpetual light shine upon them.