CATHOLICS do not shy away from talking about death.
We have a whole month dedicated for the dead – November.
We pray for them and we ask them to pray for us.
This month, The Catholic Leader print edition is themed around All Saints’ and All Souls’ days on November 1 and 2.
This is a chance to talk about death and answer some common questions Catholics have about these feasts.
What is All Saints’ Day?
The Church hopes and prays that many souls enter Heaven.
“Those who die in God’s grace and friendship and are perfectly purified live for ever with Christ,” the Catholic Catechism said.
“They are like God for ever, for they ‘see him as he is’, face to face.”
But not everyone who dies and enters Heaven can be canonised by the Church (and have their face on T-shirts and flags at St Peter’s Square).
This is a practical limitation. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which investigates the lives of well-known holy men and women, is simply unable to look into every person’s life.
The saints we know like St Dominic and St Catherine of Siena are a fraction of the complete litany of Heaven’s choir.
There are many saints we do not know are saints.
These saints might be your parents, or your husband or wife, your parish priest, your neighbour, your butcher, anyone.
All of these saints are seeing God “face to face” just like St Francis of Assisi or St Therese of Lisieux.
All Saints’ Day is the Church’s day set aside to venerate all the saints who are in Heaven, especially those who are not canonised by the Church.
It is a chance to ask them to pray for us on our mortal journey just as they have completed their own journey home to the Father.
What is All Souls’ Day?
Not all the dead go to Heaven. The Church teaches that people who die in a state of unrepentant, grave sin go to Hell.
Sadly, these souls shut themselves off from the mercy of God and cannot be redeemed.
The Church also teaches that many people “die in God’s grace and friendship, but (are) still imperfectly purified”.
These souls are saved but still need to go through a “purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven”, the catechism said.
This purification is Purgatory.
“It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins,” (2 Maccabees 12:46).
The Church teaches that souls in Purgatory cannot pray for themselves and need our petitions to help them enter Heaven.
It is a Christian duty of charity to pray for the souls of the dead. Interestingly, these souls can pray for us even though they cannot pray for themselves.
It is good to ask for their prayers, especially to obtain the salvation they are guaranteed. The day we pray for these souls is All Souls’ Day.
How can we remember our loved ones?
The best way to remember our loved ones is to go to Mass and offer it up for them on All Saints’ and All Souls’ days.
While neither All Souls’ Day nor All Saints’ Day are holy days of obligation in Australia, it is a beautiful chance to go to Mass for our deceased loved ones.
The Church has two plenary indulgences for All Souls’ Day – one for visiting a church to say the Our Father and the Creed, and another for visiting a cemetery to pray for the dead.
A plenary indulgence removes all of the temporal punishment for sin, which is why holy souls are in Purgatory in the first place.
On All Souls’ Day, these plenary indulgences are not applied to your soul but to the soul of someone in Purgatory.
This means by completing these plenary indulgences, a holy soul is released from Purgatory and enters Heaven.
Many churches will also have a Book of the Names of the Dead, in which you can write the names of those you are praying for and the Masses celebrated at that Church will also be offered up for those people.
Lighting a candle is also a beautiful way to remember the dead.
