There was a time when the Church wept in November.
Not with tears only, but with her whole body. On the second day of the month, the altar was stripped of its gold and the priest came out in black. Before the sanctuary stood the catafalque, draped and candled, a coffin with no body in it, because it was meant for all of us. Then the choir began, slowly, and the old words fell over the nave like earth on a grave:
Dies irae, dies illa,
solvet saeclum in favilla,
teste David cum Sibylla.Quantus tremor est futurus,
quando iudex est venturus,
cuncta stricte discussurus!
Day of wrath, that day which will dissolve the world in ashes, as David and the Sibyl foretold. What trembling there will be when the Judge shall come to weigh all things strictly!
No one needed to be told what the day meant. The Church was mourning her children, and she was not ashamed to grieve.
Then came the eight days. The octave of the dead. Families walked to the cemeteries in the cold and knelt in the wet grass. Old women moved from grave to grave with their rosaries, whispering names of people they had buried and people they never knew. Children were taught to pray for the soul nobody remembered. Envelopes bearing the names of the departed were laid upon the altar, and for a week the parish spoke to its dead the way a mother speaks to a child who has gone on a long and painful journey: I have not forgotten you. I am still here. I am still praying.
That world is gone. And I do not know how to say it without grief.
It did not end with a decree as Purgatory was never repealed. The indulgences for those eight days remain on the books. The doctrine still stands in the Catechism, quiet and intact, like a beautiful house no one lives in anymore. What died was the practice, and with it the instinct. Slowly, almost politely, the Church stopped looking down into the fire and began looking only at herself.
We’ve been told there is something more urgent. The kerygma. The first proclamation and a personal encounter with Jesus. These are not bad things; Christ must be preached, and hearts must be won. But somewhere along the way, encounter came to mean feeling. Now, it’s the retreat with the soft music, dimmed lights and dusty felt banners. It’s the witness talk that brings the room to tears. It’s the praise band, the raised hands and the testimony of the “weekend that changed everything.” The measure of the faith has become what we experienced. But, the dead experience nothing we can see. They cannot be moved by a worship set and they do not attend the conference. They cannot share how the Lord met them this weekend. And so, without anyone ever intending it, they have fallen out of the story.
A Church built around emotional experience has little room for those whose experience is purgation. The Church that speaks constantly of accompaniment accompanies only those who can walk beside her. The poor souls cannot walk. All they can do is wait. “Have pity on me, have pity on me, O you my friends,” they say with Job, “for the hand of God has touched me!” (Job 19:21). Unfortunately, we, the friends, are unable to see because the only thing before us is our reflection in the mirror as we constantly gaze at ourselves and evaluate our own feelings.
Think of the souls who sat in your parish pews sixty years ago. They prayed every November for the dead before them, trusting that someone would one day pray for them. Now, their children are gone. Their grandchildren were confirmed in a program that never mentioned purgatory and, by survey data, don’t even know the location of their local parish because they haven’t been there in years. Our beloved departed have names fading on stones that no one visits. They kept faith with the dead and the dead kept faith with them. Now the chain is broken. They gave and they are now left alone with no one to pray for them.
THIS is the deepest sorrow of November 2. The emptiness is not only in the pews. It is in our memory. A funeral becomes a “celebration of life.” The deceased is declared to be in heaven before the casket leaves the church. Everyone is consoled, and so no one is prayed for. We have traded the hard mercy of intercession for the soft comfort of our own reassurance and now the deceased pay for our comfort.
The old sequence knew better. Even after all its thunder, it ended not in terror but in tears and pleading:
Lacrimosa dies illa,
qua resurget ex favilla
iudicandus homo reus.
Huic ergo parce, Deus:
pie Iesu Domine,
dona eis requiem. Amen.
Tearful will be that day, when from the ashes shall rise guilty man to be judged. Therefore spare him, O God. Merciful Lord Jesus, grant them rest. Amen.
Judas Maccabeus understood what we have forgotten. He “made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin,” and Scripture calls it “a holy and pious thought” (2 Macc 12:45–46). Holy, because it is love that does not stop at the grave. Pious, because it remembers.
So remember. Go to the cemetery this week, even if you go alone. Kneel where no one kneels. Gain the indulgence and give it away. Have a Mass said for someone who has no one left. And say the old prayer slowly, as if it were the only thing keeping a soul from the dark:
Réquiem ætérnam dona eis, Dómine.
Et lux perpétua lúceat eis.
Requiéscant in pace.Fidélium ánimæ, per misericórdiam Dei, requiéscant in pace
Amen.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. May their souls and all the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.
“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?” (Lam 1:12).
O Lord, let it not be nothing to us.
