COMMEMORATION OF ALL THE FAITHFUL DEPARTED (2025)
Readings:
Wisdom 3:1-9
Psalms 23:1-6
Romans 5:5-11
John 6:37-40
I liked the ‘borrowed’ title above, “Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed,” for it better suits my understanding of what we are celebrating in general, and in particular, it is more akin to my theological understanding of the concept of purgatory. Yesterday the Church celebrated “All Saints Day,” which today the Church confirms the Church’s understanding that everyone in heaven is not a saint (but if they did enough good in their lives would be welcomed through the pearly gates). Under the tutelage of the good Sisters of St. Joseph, my brother, and sister, and I, must have prayed an innumerable number of people from the mildly minor horrors of purgatory into the eternal joys of heavenly bliss. At times it seemed like we were always praying for “poor souls” in purgatory, and there appeared to be an assumption that some of them were there for quite awhile. Given my life over the past nine years, I have not gotten a decent return for my efforts.
Seriously, our first reading from the Book of Wisdom gives us a sense of where the souls are whose life beyond this world is the cause of our celebration today – they are “in the hand of God, [where] no torment shall touch them. They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead…. But they are in peace.” The text goes on to say “the faithful shall abide with God in love: because grace and mercy are with His holy ones, and His care is with His elect.” Pope Benedict XVI provides the prayer book Magnificat with a perfect distillation of why the Church continues to teach what I believe is an outmoded theological understanding of purgatory. Pope Benedict states, and I quote at length:
“I would go so far as to say that if there was no purgatory,
then we would have to invent it, for who would dare say of
himself that he was able to stand directly before God? And
yet we don’t want to be, to use an image from Scripture, ‘a
pot that turned out wrong,’ that has to be thrown away;
we want to be able to be put right. Purgatory basically
means that God can put the pieces back together again.
That he can cleanse us in such a way that we are able to
be with him and can stand there in the fullness of life.
Purgatory strips off from one person what is unbearable
and from another the inability to bear certain things, so
that in each of them a pure heart is revealed, and we can
see that we all belong together in one enormous symphony
of being.”
The irony is that Benedict’s introduction to the commemoration blithely states exactly what did happen – the Church “invented” the theological construct of purgatory. The Church was more interested in ‘purging’ individuals of their unworthiness, and less interested in stressing that heaven is pure gift – most of us, even at the ‘hour of our death,’ no matter how hard we try, will have souls still stained by the faults we developed in life, and, as Pope Benedict might say, we are in need of having our souls made whole in order to enjoy the beatific vision. Even all the saints who were celebrated yesterday arrived in heaven with souls not fully whole.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the purgatory preached by the Church does not conform to the love of God made visible in Jesus Christ, the God revealed to us in Scriptures. Our beautiful responsorial Psalm 23 ends affirming our eventual destination: “Only goodness and kindness shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for years to come.” Even our second reading reminds us that we are “justified by the Lord’s blood” shed for us on the cross. The purgatory of my childhood was like God’s waiting room, with God as the Warden who decided (When God went to work? When He woke up? – Does God sleep?), who would be getting out of purgatory, and who still needed more time “getting things stripped off.” Remember, there is no time in heaven, just eternity. But is there time in God’s waiting room? By what standards would God judge “that your time being purged” was up? The God we worship is anything but arbitrary and capricious.
Today we celebrate the souls in heaven because at the time of their death, in the blink of an eye, God purges us of all and anything that might be sinful. It is not a waiting room that we look forward to, it is the embrace of a God who welcomes us home. In the collective lives that we have lived, we know thousands of souls who now live the eternal life that God desires for all of us. May this day remind us of all that awaits us, and may it remind us of the unconditional and forgiving love of the God we worship.
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