When I was a child, I was fascinated with an electric candle in my grandfather’s basement next to a statue of St. Anthony and his mother’s glasses. My grandfather would often walk up to the candle, which was perpetually lit, and stretch out his arm to touch the small brass candleholder. He would tell me about his mother, my great-grandmother, whom I had never met, but about whom I learned much from his stories. I learned that he was utterly devoted to her, that he was immensely grateful for the love and care she had shown him, and that he credited her for the person he had become. Never before, or since, had I seen someone so dutifully committed to the memory of one who had died.
My grandfather died last year. As we approach All Souls’ Day in the liturgical calendar, I am reminded of how he modeled what it looks like to honor the memory of a deceased loved one. Catholics observe All Souls’ Day, or the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, on Nov. 2 of each year. As the name implies, it is a day of remembrance: We remember the faithfulness of those who have died and pray that their souls will attain eternal union with God. Despite its deep spiritual significance, All Souls’ Day may strike many Catholics as the arcane and somewhat ghoulish follow-up to the more joyful worship of All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1.
When we pray for the dead and perform one or several of the memorial acts commended by the church, we express our love for the dearly departed.
Theologically, All Souls’ Day is bound up with the doctrine of purgatory: The dead we pray for are in the process of purgation, or purification, through which their souls are made ready to be in the presence of God. While the souls in purgatory are assured of salvation, they nevertheless retain imperfections from past sins and so are not yet prepared to see God face to face. In purgatory, these souls are purified “so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1030).
Like their medieval forebears, some modern Catholics still tend to think of purgatory as a hellish place, while others envision it as a kind of waiting room for souls desperate to be freed from debts incurred in their earthly lives. We also tend to link purgatory with the sale of indulgences, or the remission of temporal punishment for confessed sins, a practice to which Martin Luther famously objected in his “Ninety-Five Theses.”
Given its associations with archaic and discredited ideas about purgatory, it is no surprise that many Catholics today fail to appreciate the meaning and moral value of remembrance on All Souls’ Day.
Purgatory may seem like an abstract theological concept, the product of medieval metaphysical speculation on what happens to our souls when our bodies perish. Yet the Catechism explains that the doctrine of purgatory is partly “based on the practice of prayer for the dead,” which has its origins in Scripture (No. 1032). In the Second Book of Maccabees, Judas Maccabeus makes atonement for the dead who have fallen in battle “so that they might be delivered from their sin” (2 Macc 12:45).
We can understand our remembrance of the dead as an obligated means to help the souls in purgatory attain their end in God.
Praying for the dead was also central to early Christian practice, especially in connection with the Eucharist. In Augustine’s Confessions, his mother, Monica, asks her son “only to be remembered at [God’s] altar”—that is, in the Eucharist—“where she had served [God] with never a day’s absence.” After her death, Augustine asks his readers to pray for her so that she may enjoy eternal rest with God.
Purgatory logically follows from this early Christian practice of praying for the dead. If Monica’s soul is in hell, then prayers cannot help her there; a soul in hell cannot escape its eternal punishment. On the other hand, if her soul is in heaven, she does not need our prayers since she is with God. Therefore, Monica’s soul must reside where no soul resides eternally, a liminal space of spiritual purification where prayers can help her. Augustine, like many other Christians in his day, believed that praying for Monica could help her endure this final purgation and attain the beatific vision. Her eternal happiness depended, in part, on whether Augustine and his readers remembered her faithfulness at the Eucharistic table.
The doctrine of purgatory as put forth in the Catechism reflects Augustine’s belief that our relationships transcend the ostensible barrier between life and death. Because we continue to be in relationship with the dead, we can think about the value of remembrance on All Souls’ Day in at least two, non-exclusive ways. Both are rooted in the commandment to love our neighbor.
First, we can understand our remembrance of the dead as an obligated means to help the souls in purgatory attain their end in God. Just as we should strive to alleviate the material or spiritual suffering of the living on their earthly sojourn, the commandment to love our neighbor calls us to comfort the suffering of the faithful departed in purgatory with “almsgiving, indulgences, and works of penance” on their behalf (Catechism, No. 1032). Catholics believe that performing one or several of these memorial acts can, by the grace of God, help the faithful departed endure the final purification and become truly holy.
From this perspective, our remembrance on All Souls’ Day is instrumentally valuable. We should remember the souls in purgatory and offer prayers or works of penance on their behalf to hasten the process in which they prepare to see God face to face.
This is the most obvious way to think about the value of remembrance in the context of All Souls’ Day. It has deep historical roots in the tradition of the church. Nevertheless, our remembrance is not only valuable insofar as our prayers and works of penance offer the dead some consolation. When we understand memory exclusively as a means to an end, we may come to view All Souls’ Day as a purely transactional affair between us and God with memory as our spiritual currency. We cannot compel God to grant eternal rest to the faithful departed—this was the error of Johann Tetzel and others who sold indulgences in the late medieval period. To correct this one-sided and potentially misleading characterization of memory’s value in praying for the dead, we should acknowledge the intrinsic value of remembrance to the relationships we still have with our deceased loved ones.
Remembrance does not have to accomplish anything to be valuable, even if we rightly hope that God will hear our prayers.
As the moral philosopher Jeffrey Blustein observes, the intrinsic value of remembrance lies in its ability to express an array of attitudes and emotions that are likewise valuable in and of themselves. For example, suppose I remember my friend’s birthday and send her a birthday card. The fact that I remembered her birthday and chose to commemorate its occasion with a heartfelt card expresses my care for my friend. The value of my care is not reducible to the effects it has on my friend, even if my expression of care makes my friend feel cared for. My care also has value in and of itself as a constitutive aspect of our relationship. Given that my friend is my friend, she deserves my care, and when I show that I care for her by remembering her birthday, I fulfill one important duty of friendship.
In a similar vein, when we pray for the dead and perform one or several of the memorial acts commended by the church, we express our love for the dearly departed. Insofar as our relationships with others persist even after their deaths, we continue to owe this love to our friends and relatives following the commandment to love our neighbor.
We should remember the faithful departed on All Souls’ Day not only because our prayers and acts of penance can help the souls in purgatory become truly holy, but also because we continue to owe the dead our love and we express this love in and through our remembrance. In the absence of such remembrance, the love one professes for another would seem to be no true love at all, and the relationship one claims to still have with the dead could only be superficial.
Remembrance does not have to accomplish anything to be valuable, even if we rightly hope that God will hear our prayers and let the fires of divine love purify the souls of our deceased friends and relatives.
On All Souls’ Day this year, many Catholics will visit cemeteries and decorate tombstones with flowers and votive candles. At my parish, we will memorialize the faithful departed with photos and other tokens of remembrance at the Requiem Masses performed that day. I plan on bringing with me a pair of my grandfather’s glasses, which I ordinarily keep next to my own statue of St. Anthony, just as he memorialized his mother with her glasses. I truly hope that my prayers and works of penance on behalf of my grandfather will help him attain his heavenly reward. Yet I also hope that my remembrance of him honors the wonderful man that he was and adequately expresses the love I continue to feel for him. My grandfather may have died, but he still deserves my love.
