November 2, 2025

All Souls Day (November 2)

A Day of Love…a Threefold Love

Msgr. Thomas Gervasio

On her deathbed, St. Monica 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 what the Church is doing in a very decisive way today and throughout this month dedicated to the faithful departed. Today is a day of remembrance and profound love…a threefold love actually.  
 
The first is a love that moves us to thank God for the many blessings bestowed on our loved ones who have died. As we reflect upon their lives, we can say that we benefitted from those blessings, our lives were shaped by them. Today we are grateful that they were so much a part of our life’s journey and we theirs.
 
The second love moves us to offer our prayers for the deceased so that they may be welcomed into the joy of heaven. The Book of Revelation reminds us that nothing impure or imperfect can enter heaven, and so there is, for most of us, the need for a process by which all stain of sin is washed away, all wounds are healed; a purification of all that is not Christ, before we can stand in the presence of God. The Church calls it Purgatory.  
 
Sometimes our admiration for a person who has died, however virtuous, blinds us to that need.  
 
Listen to how Pope Benedict spoke of it: 

“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.” 

But we should not think of Purgatory as some kind of fiery concentration camp or a place of torture before entering Heaven.  
 
The image of fire that is often used is a fire of passion and change. It is the fire of the transformative love of God. It is a way of God perfecting us. We lend our prayers to the final work of God’s grace to hasten a soul’s welcome into heaven.
 
The third love that characterizes this holy day is our love for the Lord Jesus who illumines the darkness of death with the bright promise of immortality. We are sustained by the Lord’s great promise of eternal life. We know that God loves us and desires our salvation. He is the only one who will understand, who will heal, forgive, and console us. He is mercy itself who will bring us and our beloved deceased into the glory of heaven.
 
I like the way St. Teresa of Calcutta put it: “The most beautiful is to come, the greatest things are yet to come. We cannot even imagine what in his infinite love God will do for his children. We can only stammer thinking about the beauty of a new heavens and a new earth.”
 
It is what we desire for ourselves and all our loved ones who have died.