All Souls’ Day
November 2 · the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed · masses, prayers, and indulgences for the souls in purgatory.
Prayers for the dead were offered in the early Church, and in the sixth century Benedictine houses kept a commemoration of their departed brethren at Whitsuntide. The day as it is now kept came from Cluny. Odilo, its abbot (d. 1048), ordered the monasteries of his congregation to observe an annual commemoration of all the faithful departed, fixed on the day after All Saints. From Cluny it spread to the other Benedictines and the Carthusians; Liège was the first diocese to adopt it, and in time it entered the calendar of the whole Western Church.1 In 1915, as the dead of the Great War multiplied, Benedict XV allowed every priest to offer three masses on that day.2
The feast is the liturgical face of purgatory. Rome teaches that those “who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified,” must “undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven” (§1030). The living help them by “prayers in suffrage for them, above all the Eucharistic sacrifice,” and the Church “also commends almsgiving, indulgences, and works of penance undertaken on behalf of the dead” (§1032). “One way we can help them is to obtain indulgences for them, so that the temporal punishments due for their sins may be remitted” (§1479). A plenary indulgence, applicable only to the souls in purgatory, is offered to those who visit a cemetery and pray for the dead from November 1 to 8, or who visit a church on All Souls’ Day and recite the Our Father and the Creed.3
The Reformation struck first at the traffic in souls and then at the doctrine behind it. Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, posted on the eve of All Saints, declared, “They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory” (thesis 27). Twenty years later, in the Smalcald Articles, he named the feast among the fruits of the mass: “they carried their trade into purgatory by masses for souls, and vigils, and weekly, monthly, and yearly celebrations of obsequies, and finally by the Common Week and All Souls Day, by soul-baths so that the Mass is used almost alone for the dead.” Purgatory, he concluded, “is to be regarded as nothing but a specter of the devil. For it conflicts with the chief article [which teaches] that only Christ, and not the works of men, are to help [set free] souls.”4 Wherever the Reformation took hold, masses for the dead ceased, and the Reformed churches kept no holy days at all: “Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.”5
Scripture leaves no interval of purging between death and glory for those who die in Christ. “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). To be “absent from the body” is to be “present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8); to depart is “to be with Christ; which is far better” (Philippians 1:23). The dying thief was promised, “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth” (Revelation 14:13), because “by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14), and “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). See also All Saints’ Day.
