Editorial
All Saints and All Souls
When we Catholics celebrate All Saints Day and All Souls Day this Friday, Nov. 1, and Saturday, Nov. 2, do we realize that we differ from other religions in doing so? We have grown up knowing that the Catholic Church honors people who lived heroically holy lives, and we also pray for our loved ones who have died and might still be in purgatory. But most other Christians do not.
Since the beginnings of Christianity, including in Rome’s catacombs, Christians honored holy people, calling them saints, and prayed to them to ask for their intercession with God. Eventually the popes reserved for themselves the right to declare someone a saint.
The penchant for declaring people to be saints, known as canonization, has definitely not slowed down. St. Pope John Paul II canonized more people than all the other popes combined, and Pope Francis continues to do so at about the same rate.
Of course, the Church doesn’t canonize people only to honor them. They are offered to us as role models. We should try to emulate the virtues displayed by those who were so close to God.
Many of the saints in heaven were known for particular virtues, which prompted the Church to name them patron saints. Almost every profession has been assigned a patron saint, some of them for strange reasons. Places, too, have patron saints. St. Francis Xavier and St. Mother Theodore Guérin are the patron saints for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.
But there are many more saints than just those the Church has officially canonized. To be a saint means simply that a person is in heaven. That’s why the Church has the feast of All Saints on Nov. 1. Some day we hope that all of us will be included among those honored on that feast.
We know for certain that some day we will be among those prayed for on the feast of All Souls on Nov. 2 because that feast is for all those who have died. At least since the time of Judas Maccabee around 160 B.C., we have prayed for the dead. That was when Judas took up a collection among his soldiers and, according to the Old Testament, “sent it to Jerusalem to provide for an expiatory sacrifice” (2 Mc 12:43).
If he did this, the Second Book of Maccabees says, “with a view to the splendid reward that awaits those who had gone to rest in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Thus he made atonement for the dead that they might be freed from sin” (2 Mc 12:45-46).
It seems strange that some Protestants do not believe in praying for the dead, because all Christians say that they believe in “the communion of saints” when they pray the Apostles’ Creed. That phrase means that we believe in a spiritual union with all members of the Christian Church, both living and dead.
Therefore, we can pray to the saints who are already in heaven to ask for their intercession, we can pray for each other as we live here on Earth, and we can pray for those who have died.
Catholics believe in praying for their dead friends and relatives in case they are not yet in heaven because, as Scripture says, nothing unclean will enter the kingdom of heaven (Rev 21:27). You and I know that not everyone who dies is worthy to enter into perfect and complete union with God. We also pray that no one will reject God’s mercy enough to sentence themselves to hell.
That means that there must be a state, or process, of purification during which every trace of sin is eliminated and every imperfection is corrected. That process, or state, is what we Catholics call purgatory.
It’s easy to think of purgatory as a place between heaven and hell when we say that someone might be in purgatory, but it is not a place; it’s a process of purgation.
We don’t know when this occurs since the concept of time is meaningless in eternity. Perhaps it occurs immediately after death or even in the process of dying. We don’t know. We only know that it is a holy and pious thought to pray for the dead.
—John F. Fink