Praying for the Departed

We Catholics pray for the departed, with particular fervor in November, primarily because our Church instructs us that such prayer helps the souls in purgatory to be released to the eternal joys of heaven. Many Protestants regard such belief with scorn. Fashionable “Spirit of Vatican II” piety implicitly relegated this practice to the null curriculum and the waste basket of superstition and ignorance: “No need for prayer; God is merciful and everyone is in heaven!” However, such prayer has many benefits for us, the living:
- We are reminded of our own purpose and destiny: we are here for a little while. We are on a pilgrimage to heaven. We need to prepare in humility, charity, trust.
- We consider the role of purgation and suffering and greet it in joy and peace. Mystics tell us that the suffering in purgatory in grave and we do better to serve our temporal punishment here on earth: offering up our pain, doing acts of mercy, contrition and forgiveness of the enemy.
- We unite ourselves more consciously with the saints in heaven and we open our lives up to mimetic participation in their life, rather than the alternative that prevails in the world around us and comes from the world below.
- It strengthens our bonds with our dearly beloved. As we pray for parents, family, and especially the preceding generation who gave us life and faith, we deepen our gratitude and more deeply interiorize the love and devotion they gave us. As children we tend to be ungrateful, but with the passing of the years we appropriate anew the love we took for grated and ignored in youthful foolishness.

It is almost like the old pragmatic argument: even if there is no purgatory and no real value in prayers for the dead, we would have to invent the practice and convince ourselves of it because of the Good that we derive from it. Well the Good News is that we don’t have to invent such a myth because the reality of purgatory is True. We receive this truth with certainty from the Church. And not only is it Good and True, but this reality (like all of Being) is equally Beautiful! There is a splendor to the justice and logic of it: that we all receive our just reward, that we have a chance in God’s mercy to finally amend our wrongdoing, that we are all united in the Communion of Saint, that we the Church Militant assist the Church Suffering just as the Church Victorious helps us, that our beloved departed will await us at heaven’s gates, that our unfinished amendment on earth may be helped by those we leave behind. About the granting of indulgences there is a particular, almost mathematical clarity and definiteness: a specific act is required, always prayers for the Pope, communion and confession, freedom from attachment to sin and living in the state of grace. This clear and formal combination makes us clear and transparent conduits for the flow of grace from the merits of those in heaven to those in purgatory who are still in debt. About this, and indeed all aspects of canon law, there is clarity, delineation, and a formliness that unveils the splendid logic and form of our salvation.

It is Good for us to pray for our beloved departed; it is Good, True and Beautiful, as are all things of God, his Church and his creation!