Need a Mass Card? Why?

Need a Mass Card?  Why?

A uniquely Catholic custom is to give someone grieving the death of a loved one, a “Mass card”—a card that indicates that a Mass will be celebrated at a certain place and time for the deceased.  What is the basis for this practice?  Why should the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass be offered for one who has died?

The simple answer could be that charity demands it.  Pope Benedict XVI observed that “praying for our departed loved ones is a far too immediate urge to be suppressed” and that “the happiness or unhappiness of a person dear to me, who has now crossed to the other shore, depends in part on whether I remember or forget him; he does not stop needing my love.”

This love is shown through the Masses, prayers, indulgences, alms, and sacrifices we can and should offer for the faithful departed.  They are needed so that the deceased can achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven. This belief is based in the doctrine of Purgatory, a teaching of comfort and hope.

What is Purgatory?  When someone dies, we rightly thank God for the virtues he or she practiced throughout life.  But we also realize that as weak human beings, we love God and neighbor imperfectly.  We die with Christ not yet perfected in us—and nothing tainted by sin, nothing imperfect, can stand in the presence of God. So, a purification or perfecting must take place, a final work of grace, to free the deceased from every encumbrance of sin.  Since the deceased can no longer do this for themselves, we can and should lovingly lend our prayers and sacrifices to that perfecting. These help the holy souls pass more quickly over the great divide that separates them from God. This is why Purgatory has often been called, “the waiting room of heaven.”

St. Catherine of Genoa wrote: “No one is barred from heaven.  Whoever wants to enter heaven may do so because God is all-merciful.  Our Lord will welcome us into glory with his arms wide open. The Almighty is so pure, however that if a person conscious of the least trace of imperfection and at the same time understands that Purgatory is ordained to do away with such impediments, the soul enters this place of purification glad to accept so great a mercy of God.”  

The late Justice Antonin Scalia keenly observed, “Even when the deceased was an admirable person—praise for his virtues can cause us to forget that we are praying for and giving thanks for God’s inexplicable mercy to a sinner.”  Thus, we should not show them a kind of “false love” and allow our admiration to deprive the decedent of our prayers so that all stain of sin be washed away, that all wounds be healed, and that they be purified of all that is not Christ. And there is no more efficacious way to do that than through the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

St. Ambrose summed it up: “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.”   TG