This Week's Homily

November 2

All Souls' Day

Msgr. Thomas Gervasio

On her deathbed, St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine told her sons: “Put this body anywhere! Don’t trouble yourselves about it! I simply ask you to remember me at the Lord’s altar wherever you are.” Speaking of those who have died, St. Ambrose said, “We have loved them during life,” let us not abandon them in death until we have conducted them by our prayers into the house of the Lord.” This is precisely what the Church looks at in a very focused way today and throughout this month which we dedicate to the faithful departed.

Love draws us here today. We might say it is a threefold love. The first is a love that moves us to offer our thanks to God for the many blessings great and small bestowed on our beloved deceased. We benefited from those blessings, our lives were shaped by them. Today we are grateful that those who have gone before us were so much a part of our own life’s journey and we theirs.

The second love moves us to offer our prayers for our deceased loved ones that they be welcomed into the joy and glory of heaven. The Book of Revelation reminds us that nothing impure, imperfect can enter the presence of God and so there is for most of us, a need for purification before we can stand in the presence of God. Most of us leave this world neither deserving of hell nor yet fit for heaven. The Church has always taught that there is a final process of purification to cleanse away anything that might stand between the soul and God. This is what we call Purgatory. Sometimes our admiration for a person, however virtuous, blinds us to that need. Listen to Pope Benedict’s observation on the need to pray for the dead: “The fact is that all of us today think that we are so good that we deserve nothing less than heaven. Yet our experience tells us that we are not perfect beings. We are aware of our sins and the fact that we neglect the penance we should do for them. We cannot know the inner state of the soul of one at death. We can never know a person as God knows them. Most of us die in an imperfect state with so much left undone. This is why we need a final cleansing in which the gaze of Christ burns us free from everything…and only under this purifying gaze are we fit to be with God and able to make our home with him.

Not a dreary prison or fiery concentration camp. God isn't sending us to a punishment of fire to torture us before entering Heaven, but instead we pass through a purifying fire, that burns away any smaller sins that we are holding onto when we die.

Above all, the fire of purgatory is not meant to part of a gruesome torture, but a way to prepare our hearts to more fully embrace the joys of Heaven.