An hour ago I had a pleasant conversation with a priest friend, an octogenarian monsignor who most days offers mass privately in his home. At my request he will offer masses for Caesar Chavez and Father/Bishop-by-virtue-of-indelible-seal-of-ordination Ted McCarrick. He would not take a donation. He was happy to do so as he is an admirer of both. He served as pastor under McCarrick for the entirety of his time in Newark and knows many good things about him. He mentioned that we don't know that they didn't repent of their sins. I was delighted that he is saying these masses.
As I get older, I like to pray for the souls and have masses said. I am getting closer to my own particular judgement, retribution, mercy and wrath. This is important. This is Catholic. A crucial conflict between the Protestant reformers and Catholicism was precisely masses and prayers for the souls in purgatory. In the wake of Vatican II, which was an ecumenical reconciliation, there was a covert triumph of the reformers in the "Spirit of Vatican II". It was not that anyone denied purgatory or actively discouraged prayer for the deceased. But, in large part, we simply stopped doing it. It was now the null curriculum. Funeral services became Resurrection-focused, sin-ignoring, eulogy addicted, solemnity-deprived, retribution-denying, and heaven-presuming. Catholic ritual continued to pray for the deceased; but popular piety imbibed the cool aid of a secularized, sentimental, superficial, cockeyed optimism.
Next I hope to have masses said for Jefferey Epstein and Bernie Maddow. Then, Brigid Bardot and Ingrid Bergman. Probably Fr. Bruce Ritter and Jean Vanier. After that I am even thinking about Saddam Hussein and Osama ben Laden.
In each of these I see good. I cannot just accept that their souls go to hell.
Note: the normal donation for a mass is still $10, the most inflation-resisting bargain in the world. Of course, it is a donation: one can give more or less or nothing at all. To "sell" a sacrament is the serious sin of simony. I don't want to have these masses said in the parish as it can cause scandal, confusion and unhealthy controversy. So, for my new crusade, I hope to quietly engage priest friends, out of the limelight.
I am not inclined to pray for Fr. Marcial Maciel, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, or Mao. I won't deny you the right to pray for them. Theoretically it might be good for me to pray for them...and Pilate, Nero, Genghis Khan, Count Dracula, and Ivan the Terrible. But psychologically I cannot grab on to any good in them. It doesn't feel right to me.
We pray always for Mercy and Justice. Not just mercy. But mercy in justice, truth, and annihilation of evil. We want retribution: not revenge, but justice as good for good and destruction of evil.
We do not pray for Lucifer and his minions.
The classics, of course, are JFK and MKL. St. Padre Pio had high regard for American presidents and was deeply saddened by the assassination of Kennedy. He allegedly told a priest friend that Kennedy was in heaven. It is also reported that Pio said he benefited from all the prayers of the faithful. Does this mean we need not pray for him? I think not! This is, after all, private revelation. If anything, he may be in heaven as God foresaw all the prayers for him. And likewise in the case of King.
A death brings for us here closure, a conclusion. But not absolute finality. For the damned, the judgement is definitive. But the soul in purgatory is still in motion; and the one in heaven intercedes for us on earth. Life here is not self-contained, but opens up to a broader, eternal drama.
Additionally, as considered in an earlier blog, it is possible that the moment of death, for each of us, included hardened sinners themselves in the act of a mortal sin, might have each of us face to face with the wounded-but-glorified Jesus in his final offer of Mercy albeit with Justice. With that in mind, we do well to pray for those who have died even hard in sin. As God transcends time, our prayers are retroactively efficacious.
The Church in her wisdom has assigned no person to hell; in her mercy she buries the murderer, terrorist, pedophile, suicide, and the psychopath. There are rare exceptions this, for pastoral reasons, where it would cause scandal. The practice of the Church resonates with the question of Balthasar: Dare we hope?
And we hope that when each of us faces that moment, we will benefit from prayers and masses yet to be offered for us in the Body of Christ, the Church. In the meantime, we do well to revive our Catholic practice of prayer for the souls, even of hardened sinners, as our conscience and the Holy Spirits prompts us. As we emulate Christ and his saints in their thirst for souls, we all benefit.
May their souls...and the souls of the faithful departed...as well as the not so faithful departed...through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.
