Remember, Remember, Remember - it’s November!
Given that this is the beginning of the month of November and all around us for the next few days fireworks will be let off to the chant of ‘Remember remember the 5th of November’, I want to say “Remember, remember the month of November..for it is the month of the Holy Souls.” So I am combining All Saints with All Souls in this blog today. For both deal with the existential questions of where do we come from and where are we going?
On Friday we had 1st November when some of us might have chosen to celebrate not just the Solemnity of the All Saints as it is a holiday of obligation. But we might have also celebrated All Saints Fireworks night, instead of Guy Fawes Fireworks, so as to celebrate the Saints in Heaven and celebrate the hope that we may get to Heaven and join that celestial company in the Beatific Vision. It is also a celebration that calls us to be saints, here and now, for we are on a great journey which is not on the road to nowhere but on the road with a definite destination, either it is the destination of heaven or the destination of hell! Meanwhile, others in the coming days will be celebrating the anti-Catholic memorial of the 5th November when the gunpowder plot was discovered which led to the execution of Guy Fawkes, and the subsequent aggressive anti-Catholic laws that followed!
On Saturday, we celebrate the Commemoration of All Souls when we both remember and pray for all those souls whom we have loved be they family members, relatives, friends and parishioners that have gone to God. November is the month of Prayer for the Holy Souls. It is a tradition where we personally put a list of our dearly departed in a Holy Souls envelope with a monetary sacrifice and place it in the Holy Souls Box before the altar. The Holy Souls are the souls in Purgatory who we do not just remember but also offer up sacrifices of our time, our treasures and good works be they through our monies, litanies, devotional prayers, fasts, visits to the cemeteries and in the weekday Masses of November.
Meanwhile, others have replaced this Spiritual and Corporal Work of mercy with Halloween and are caught up with a pagan festivity of ghosts and ghouls, witches and demons. It seems that what followed after the Gunpowder plot was a growing darkness in England. It was after the gunpowder plot that William Shakespeare wrote his darkest play to capture the death of the Catholic soul of England, it was called MacBeth. In place of the Catholic prayers and rites of the Holy Mass for the souls of the dead, we have the dark words and rituals of the three witches of Macbeth that would now pervade a very anti-Catholic England, and which has now become in our own times an even darker pagan England:
2 WITCH. Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
It seems the words are true ‘that when people cease to believe in God they do not believe in nothing, rather they believe in anything’ and so many today join in the rituals of ghost and ghoul, witches and demons with smiles on their faces and ‘Trick or treat’ on their lips! Many are tricked out of the eternal treat of Holy Mass for the treat of an infernal ritual all because the kids love to do it! Maybe the kids know more than their parents do! Maybe they are able to see that there is a dark side to life that all the comforts and platitudes of those who blandly say God is dead and religion belongs to the past, can no longer see.
So what does the month of the Holy Souls really mean? It means that there is, after death, a time of judgment before the judgment seat of God that no soul can escape. Here our whole life is put before us and it is then that we know for certain that heaven and hell are real! If we consider ourselves as we are now, many of us will sense that we are not quite ready to go straight to heaven, but hopefully few of us will feel we ought to go straight to hell!!! So many of us are stuck in the middle: neither bad enough for hell nor good enough for heaven. We know that there are things in our lives that are bad, sinful or even evil but we have not fully faced up to them or have not done sufficient penance over them.
It is here that this month of the Holy Souls calls each of us to consider that there are souls not in heaven who did not make proper amends for the sins they committed in this life. But keep this in mind, these are called Holy Souls because they are souls who before they died where fully contrite for all the sins they had committed. They are souls who are on the way to heaven because of the perfect contrition they made before they died. Unlike the souls of the damned that died in a state of impenitence and refused God’s mercy and forgiveness...even on their death bed. For God is merciful and does not want any of us to be lost and seeks us to the end of our days to come back to him. It is for this reason that God sent his Son, that his Son died on the cross for our sins and that his Son is raised from the dead. But God cannot take away our free will as we saw with Judas and the bad thief on the cross. If we deny God’s mercy right up to the end then on the other side of death is eternity where our will, our impenitent will, will be fixed for ever.
If we consider how in every Mass during the Eucharistic prayer we pray for the dead then we now know why. The dead are in one of three places: if they are in heaven then they have no need of our prayers; if they are in hell our prayers cannot help them; so the prayers for the dead in the Eucharistic prayer is for the souls in purgatory, the holy Souls. So, the Holy Souls who died fully and truly sorry for all their sins, now need our help in making up for the damage their sins did on earth, namely, our acts of penance, our prayers, our sacrifices and our attendance at Holy Mass for the souls in Purgatory.
So we can do four things for the holy souls in this month of November:
Pray in our homes for all those we have lost among family, relatives, friends and parishioners and especially do this with your children;
If we are in this parish, we can go to one of the four cemeteries that will be blessed on Saturdays at 12noon;
If we are in this parish, stay after Mass and do the Memorial prayer for the dead;
Make sure you have made a list of your deceased loved ones AND put it in a Holy Souls envelope with a monetary sacrifice and THEN place it in the Holy Souls Box before the altar.
If we do not do any of these THINGS then what kind of a friend are we? What kind of a parishioner are we? What kind of a parish do we live in? What kind of a family are we? If we have never been seen doing this by our family, by our friends or by our parishioners for any of our own deceased - whom we say we loved - who will be left behind to pray for us when we go before God?
NB All Souls Indulgences
An indulgence, applicable only to the souls in purgatory, is granted to the faithful, who devoutly visit a cemetery and pray, even if only mentally, for the departed. The indulgence is plenary each day from the first to the eighth of November; on other days of the year it is partial.
A plenary indulgence, applicable only to the souls in purgatory, is granted to the faithful, who on the day dedicated to the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed [November 2 {as well as on the Sunday preceding or following, and on All Saints' Day}] piously visit a church. In visiting the church it is required that one Our Father and the Creed be recited.
To acquire a plenary indulgence it is necessary also to fulfil the following three conditions: sacramental Confession, Eucharistic communion, and prayer for the intention of the Holy Father. The three conditions may be fulfilled several days before or after the performance of the visit; it is, however, fitting that communion be received and the prayer for the intention of the Holy Father be said on the same day as the visit.
The condition of praying for the intention of the Holy Father is fully satisfied by reciting one Our Father and one Hail Mary. A plenary indulgence can be acquired only once in the course of the day. However, throughout the rest of November one can obtain a partial indulgence [following the usual conditions mentioned above] when one visits a cemetery and prays for the Holy Souls in Purgatory and for the intentions of the Pope.
Watch YouTube Video on a Sermon on Purgatory by the Jesuit Fr John Hardon SJ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgS369af1Rw&ab_channel=ReturnToTradition
