Dear Fellow Parishioners,

Since Sunday is the Feast of All Souls, I’d like to follow up on what I mentioned in my previous Pastor’s Desk. The Feast of All Souls is important enough that it is one of the very few observances on the liturgical calendar which, while not being a Holy Day of Obligation, still supplants the regular Sunday celebration.

The observance of All Souls’ is the product of church teaching, devotional piety, and the felt experience of believers. On this point, let me quote the 20th century Jesuit theologian and spiritual master, Fr. Karl Rahner.

“The great mistake of many people – among them, even pious persons – is to imagine that those whom death has taken, leave us. They do not leave us. They remain! Where are they? In darkness? Oh, no! It is we who are in darkness. We do not see them, but they see us. Their eyes, radiant with glory, are fixed upon our eyes full of tears… Though invisible to us, our dead are not absent.

“I have often reflected upon the surest comfort for those who mourn. It is this: a firm faith in the real and continual presence of our loved ones; it is the clear and penetrating conviction that death has not destroyed them, nor carried them away. They are not even absent, but living near to us, transfigured… On the contrary, they have, in depth and fervor of devotion, grown larger a hundredfold. Death is, for the good, a translation into light, into power, into love. Those who on earth were only ordinary Christians become perfect… those who were good become sublime.”

Believers have prayed for the dead since the earliest times of the Church, and even before. It arose out of lived human experience of the closeness of our beloved departed, and an example of the principle, “Lex orandi, lex credenda,” which means, “how people pray indicates how and what they believe.”

In Catholic teaching, Purgatory (that medieval word!) is not a physical place, but a necessary process of purification in which our souls are prepared to be in the presence of Almighty God. In this life, all symphonies remain unfinished. We all die imperfect – i.e., incomplete – and must undergo this purification and liberation. I think of it being unburdened of our spiritual “baggage” – whether of a sinful nature or not – so that we can be in the unmediated presence, light and love of Almighty God.

As I’ve mentioned many times before, the most important virtues to cultivate as we get older are the “theological virtues” – faith, hope and love. In practice, perhaps the greatest of these is hope – not mere optimism, or the belief that all will go as we wish, but a deep and unshakeable conviction that God’s promises to each of us will be kept.

This, I believe, is closer to the real meaning of the Feast of All Souls, and “Day of the Dead,” lest we live as people who have no real hope.

Blessings, Fr. Bill Donahue