Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
The Commemoration of All The Faithful Departed, All Souls’ Day
November 2, 2023
2 Macc 12:38-46, Ps 25, 1 Thess 4:13-18, Lk 23:33.39-43
To listen to an audio recording of this Mass, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- Today we come together to fulfill the sweetest of all the spiritual works of mercy, which is to pray for the dead. With Catholics throughout the world, we commemorate all the faithful departed — those who died within the last day, the beloved deceased members of our families, those who have perished of natural causes as well the victims of war, violence and genocide, those who have died of hunger, disease and neglect, the infants who have died in miscarriages or who have been killed through exposure or abortion, the seniors who have been tragically killed through euthanasia, the Christians who have died for the faith in persecution, the anonymous who rest in common graves, and those forgotten by the world and whose names are known only by God. The Church remembers the faithful departed not just on this day but throughout the entire month of November in a special way. We begin the month, as we did yesterday, by celebrating the saints — those who are definitively in heaven, the canonized and un-canonized saints — and by invoking their intercession as we continue on our pilgrimage of faith in this world. But then we immediately turn in suffrage for all those who have died, those who long to share in the communion of the saints but who are not yet experiencing their joy. To pray for the dead is the main purpose of All Souls Day. We pray for the dead because we know in faith three truths: first, contrary to the popular heresy that presumes that everyone who dies automatically goes to a “better place,” the Catholic faith does not believe everyone who dies goes to heaven, especially immediately; second, the dead may need our help; and third our prayers and sacrifices can in fact help them. All Souls Day is an occasion to examine more deeply these three truths of faith.
- First, the Church teaches that to enter heaven, one must be completely attached to God and radically detached from all sin and everything that is not of God. “Nothing unclean shall enter heaven,” the Book of Revelation tells us (Rev. 21:27). There are many who do not live and die with that type of purity of life and hence they need to be purified to enter into the kingdom in which God is all in all. This state in which the dead are decontaminated from all sin and worldliness has been traditionally called by the Church “Purgatory” from the Latin term purgare, which means “to cleanse.” In 2007, Pope Benedict wrote an encyclical letter on Christian hope in which he talked about what happens after we die and about who goes to Hell, Heaven and Purgatory. He described Hell as that state where those people go “who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves.” He commented, “This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history.” He doesn’t mention anyone by name, but we can think that some genocidal leaders, sadistic serial killers, abortionists, if their deeds correspond to what was really in their hearts and they failed to repent, would end up there. “In such people,” Pope Benedict added, “all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable. This is what we mean by the word Hell.” Hell, the Catechism tells us, is the place of “definitive self-alienation” from God. All who go to Hell choose it, because they would consider Heaven — where everyone adores God — a hell for them who want a life without God. I’ve seen glimpses of those who would be in Hell by those who seemed to choose it on earth. I remember with horror a few deathbeds at which I’ve been present when family members have called me at the last second in the hope that their family member, like the Good Thief, would open up to receive God’s mercy. Some have, and their last-minute conversions are among the most beautiful moments in priestly life. But others have not. Some dying people have started to yell at me as soon as I entered the room, with clenched fists and expletives telling me to leave, screaming that they’ve lived their life without God until then and don’t want to die with God either. To the extent they of sound mind were speaking, and we were not hearing the howls of the devil in someone he had possessed, it would give evidence of self-exclusion. Hell is a real possibility for human freedom. Heaven, Pope Benedict said in contrast, is the place to which go those “who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbors—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfillment what they already are.” Not even all the canonized saints go immediately to heaven because, even though they live the Christian faith with heroic virtue, there may be parts of their life that upon death are not yet totally redeemed, they may still have some defects, whether anger, impatience, vanity, lack of total forgiveness for those who have hurt them, or other reasons. Pope Benedict tells us that “we know from experience that neither case” — those who have totally destroyed their desire for God or those who live exclusively out of that desire — “is normal in human life.” He goes on to describe Purgatory. “For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul. What happens to such individuals when they appear before the Judge?” He says that they need to be purified, to “pass through fire so as to become fully open to receiving God and able to take our place at the table of the eternal marriage-feast.” That encounter happens in the fire of Christ’s saving love. “Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves.” This, he says with hope, is the place where the great majority of people go, the people who are in need of this purifying fire of Christ’s love. Today is not for the few, in other words, but for the many. We’ll return to the spiritual consequences of this with regard to what we’re doing today shortly.
- The second truth is that, therefore, those who have died may need our help. The Church has believed in the need for purification after death since before she was even founded. In the second book of Maccabees, written about 140 years before Christ’s birth, we see that that the Jewish people offered sacrifices in the temple for all those Jews who had lived a double life and betrayed the Lord by carrying in their clothing various idols of the Greek pagans who sought to destroy the temple and extirpate the Jewish faith. Very much to the point, the sacred author wrote: if they “were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead” (2 Macc 12:43-45). In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come” (Mt 12:32), implying quite clearly that there are some sins that can be forgiven in the age to come, the type of sin which St. John’s first letter says is not “mortal” or “deadly” (1 John 5:16). Continuing the tradition of the faithful Jews, the Church has therefore prayed for people to be purified of their venial sins, because such behavior is not “superfluous” or “foolish.” With our beloved dead, we never know if they might have been hiding some sins out of fear or weakness. And so we come here to do something far more important than sending two-thousand silver drachmas (about $1,300 today) to Jerusalem for a sacrifice of atonement. We come to offer to the eternal Father the body, blood, soul and divinity of his dearly beloved Son, in expiation for our sins, the sins of our loved ones, and the sins of the whole world.
- That brings us to the third truth of faith. The Church teaches that our prayers actually can and do help the dead if they are in purgatory, where any and all vestiges of distorted self-love are transformed into love of God. Second Maccabees tells us, very succinctly, “It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they might be loosed from their sins” (2 Macc 12:45). The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “From the beginning the Church has honored the memory of the dead and offered prayers in suffrage for them, above all the Eucharistic sacrifice, so that, thus purified, they may attain the beatific vision of God. The Church also commends almsgiving, indulgences, and works of penance undertaken on behalf of the dead” (CCC 1032). God has set up the economy of salvation so that our deeds of love offered in union with Christ’s own sacrifice may help others. Christ calls us to be co-redeemers with him. Just as his passion, death and resurrection brought salvation to the whole human race, so our deeds of love united to his, by God’s own design, can help those who have gone before us. This is one of the reasons why St. Paul could exclaim, “I make up what is lacking in my own flesh of the sufferings of Christ for the sake of His Body, the Church” (Col 1:24). The Church teaches that praying for the dead is a spiritual work of mercy, a spiritual work of loving co-redemption. And the greatest prayer of all we could offer for the dead is the prayer of the Mass, when we unite our own personal prayers — those emanating from our lips, our hearts, even our bodies in all types of actions of loving sacrifice for others — to Christ’s own prayer, his continuous, saving sacrifice once-and-for-all begun during the Last Supper and finished on the Cross. Pope Francis said in an Angelus meditation a few years ago on this feast, “Church tradition has always urged prayer for the dead, in particular by offering the celebration of the Eucharist for them: it is the best spiritual help that we can give to their souls, particularly to the most abandoned ones. The foundation of prayers in suffrage of souls is in the communion of the Mystical Body,” and that communion is expressed most powerfully at Mass. That is why the Church has venerated for centuries the practice of praying for the dead at Mass, explicitly having Masses offered for a particular loved one as well as praying, in every Eucharistic prayer, for all those “who have gone before us with the sign of faith” (Eucharistic Prayer I), as well as “all the dead, whose faith you {God] alone have known” (Eucharistic Prayer IV).
- St. Paul tells us in his First Letter to the Thessalonians that, with regard to the death of our loved ones, we Christians grieve, but we grieve differently than the rest “who have no hope” (1 Thess 4:13). We grieve because we love and we know that after the death of a loved one, life for us will never be the same. Grief is a sign of our love, of our missing the blessing the person was in our life and of our longing to enjoy that union again. So we Christians mourn differently than those pagans and atheists who think, as the fools did in the Book of Wisdom that the souls are simply “dead,” their “passing away … an affliction,” “their going forth from us utter destruction.” For them, there is no hope ever to see their loved ones again. When they lose someone tragically, how much worse is the pain, believing that no redemption is possible. Thanks be to God we Christians grieve differently! But we also grieve differently from those who have no hope because they don’t think they have to have hope, believing falsely that life in this world is inconsequential and that no matter what we do we end up in the eternal honor roll and in a “better place.” We know life matters, we know our decisions matter, and we know that most of us have good days and bad days, we know we sometimes make the right choices and sometimes make the wrong choices. We know that neither we nor our loved ones live and die as the sinless Blessed Virgin Mary; for that reason we pray, but we pray with hope and confidence in the Lord’s eternal love. The consequence of Pope Benedict’s words earlier about purgatory is that the vast majority of people will need prayers after they die. The vast majority of us will not go immediately to heaven after judgment because we’re not living with heroic virtue as true saints in this world but are regularly making compromises with our faith. And the vast majority of the dead will need a lot of prayers. Jesus gives a snap snot of where the vast majority of people are trending in St. Matthew’s Gospel when he says, “The door is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction and those who enter by it are many. And the door is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Mt 7:13-14). This is not necessarily, thanks be to God, a picture of the way everything ends up — because the whole mission of Christ and the Church he founded is to try to rescue people from the broad, easy, congested “highway to hell” and lead them to the narrow, uphill, way of the cross that leads to life — but it is a striking image, given to us by Jesus Himself, the Truth incarnate who cannot and will not deceive us, about the way the vast majority of people are heading. The vast majority of people need not just some prayers but a lot of prayers and Catholics are those who ought to be on the front lines of praying without ceasing out of love for them.
- But while praying for the dead is the main point of All Souls Day, today’s commemoration of the faithful departed and the entire month of November is likewise supposed to help us focus on the last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell. Yesterday we pondered heaven. Today is a day on which we ponder death, not just the death of those who have gone before us, but our own, and learn truly how to live so that death will be for us a happy fulfillment rather than a dreaded eventuality. In today’s Gospel, in Jesus’ dialogue with the Good Thief, we learn something really important. When Dismas asked with faith to the Crucified victim in the middle to remember him when he entered his kingdom, to a man who would die before even Dismas would die, it was a sign that he recognized that Jesus would be capable of remembering even after he breathed his last. And Jesus responded not just promising that he would remember Dismas, but that he would take Dismas with him. “Amen I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise!” Eternal life is connected not just to Jesus’ “work,” but to Jesus. We have life not just because of him but with and in him. This point is made clear in St. John’s Gospel. One is right before Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. He meets Martha who tells him that if he had been present Lazarus wouldn’t have died, but that even then, she believed that what Jesus asked of God the Father God would grant him. When Jesus assured her that Lazarus would rise, she replied — doubtless because Lazarus, Martha and Mary had asked Jesus about what happens after death when he visited them in Bethany — that she knew he would rise on the resurrection on the last day. Jesus, then, however, helped her to see that the resurrection is not so much an event as a relationship: “I am,” Jesus said, “the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever believes in me, even though he dies shall live, and no one who lives and believes in me will ever die.” Jesus asked Martha if she believed that and he asks us. If we maintain a holy communion with Jesus, if we have his life within us, then death is just a new phase of that relationship with Life not just itself but himself! And that happens through the Holy Eucharist. Jesus promises in St. John’s Gospel, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. … Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.” Each day as we receive Jesus in Holy Communion, we are able to receive the down payment of eternal life, we are able loving to abide in him, and have him abide in us, a mutual loving indwelling that is meant to last forever. From the inside, Jesus wants to help us to die to sin and what it leads to death and learn how to live with him, through him, for him and in him, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
- Today as we offer this Mass so that the faithful departed might have life and have it to the full, we also pray for ourselves, that we might enter more fully into the passion, death and resurrection of him who is the Resurrection, Way, Truth and Life, and be so transformed and raised up, that we might be his instruments to bring to so many others all that he died and rose to give us!
The readings for the Mass were:
A Reading from the Second Book of Maccabees (2 Macc 12:38-46)
Judas rallied his army and went to the city of Adullam. As the week was ending, they purified themselves according to custom and kept the sabbath there. On the following day, since the task had now become urgent, Judas and his men went to gather up the bodies of the slain and bury them with their kinsmen in their ancestral tombs. But under the tunic of each of the dead they found amulets sacred to the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids the Jews to wear. So it was clear to all that this was why these men had been slain. They all therefore praised the ways of the Lord, the just judge who brings to light the things that are hidden. Turning to supplication, they prayed that the sinful deed might be fully blotted out. The noble Judas warned the soldiers to keep themselves free from sin, for they had seen with their own eyes what had happened because of the sin of those who had fallen. He then took up a collection among all his soldiers, amounting to two thousand silver drachmas, which he sent to Jerusalem to provide for an expiatory sacrifice. In doing this he acted in a very excellent and noble way, inasmuch as he had the resurrection of the dead in view; for if he were not expecting the fallen to rise again, it would have been useless and foolish to pray for them in death. But if he did this with a view to the splendid reward that awaits those who had gone to rest in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Thus he made atonement for the dead that they might be freed from this sin.
The Word of the Lord.
Responsorial Psalm (Ps 25)
R. To you, O Lord, I lift my soul.
Remember that your compassion, O Lord,
And your kindness are from of old.
In your kindness remember me,
Because of your goodness, O Lord.
R. To you, O Lord, I lift my soul.
Relieve the troubles of my heart,
And bring me out of my distress.
Put an end to my affliction and my suffering;
And take away all my sins.
R. To you, O Lord, I lift my soul.
Preserve my life and rescue me;
Let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in you.
Let integrity and uprightness preserve me,
Because I wait for you, O Lord.
A reading from the first Letter of St. Paul to the Thessalonians (1 Thess 4:13-18)
We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep. Indeed, we tell you this, on the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will surely not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself, with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, will come down from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. Thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore, console one another with these words.
The Word of the Lord.
Alleluia Verse and Verse Before the Gospel
“Come, you who are blessed by my Father; inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke (Lk 23:33.39-43)
When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him and the criminals there, one on his right, the other on his left. Now one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.” The other, however, rebuking him, said in reply, “Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation? And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this man has done nothing criminal.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied to him, “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
The Gospel of the Lord
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