Memento Mori on All Souls Day
The Chant Is True "Pray For The Dead & The Dead Will Pray For You"
Memento moré i.e. - ‘Membah death.
Today is All Souls Day, the day that Holy Mother Church uses to remind the faithful that Ben Franklin was half right: death is certain and Our Lord is 100% correct.
Amen, amen I say unto you, that he who heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath life everlasting; and cometh not into judgment, but is passed from death to life.
If we can be passed from death to life then surely we can be passed from life unto death with death being what most people today seem to be literally lunging for: Hell. Yet, in His mercy, God has deigned to provide us a method of failing in this “race” as Saint Paul calls it but still obtaining the prize of heaven: Purgatory. I have a list of souls I pray for, they are printed on the first page of my Purgatorian Manual, a devotion I’ve carried out every November day since 2014 and I encourage you to consider taking it up, too.
We live in an age where coffin canonizations are ubiquitous. Where every Aunt Maime and Uncle Bobo “are in heaven….Aunt Maime at the pedicure lounge with a daiquiri and Kindle book and Uncle Bobo at the 19th hole sipping an Old Fashioned…looking down and smiling at us.” That is the muslim version of paradise, parading about the charms of this world as if God is the universe’s oldest version of John Belushi. How many billions of souls now languish in Purgation because of this perversion of the beatific vision? Dom Prosper Gueranger begins his Liturgical Year prose for this day, thus.
We will not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning them that are asleep, that you be not sorrowful, even as others who have no hope. The Church today has the same desire as the Apostle thus expressed to the first Christians. The truth concerning the dead not only proves admirably the union between God’s justice and his goodness; it also inspires a charitable pity which the hardest heart cannot resist, and at the same time offers to the mourners the sweetest consolation. If faith teaches us the existence of a purgatory, where our loved ones may be detained by unexpiated sin, it is also of faith that we are able to assist them; and theology assures us that their more or less speedy deliverance lies in our power.
I will leave you with this passage from Danté’s Purgatorio, Canto I and plead with you for the sake of All Souls: memento moré!
I saw beside me an old man alone,
Worthy of so much reverence in his look, That more owes not to father any son.A long beard and with white hair intermingled He wore, in semblance like unto the tresses, Of which a double list fell on his breast.
The rays of the four consecrated stars Did so adorn his countenance with light, That him I saw as were the sun before him.
“Who are you? ye who, counter the blind river, Have fled away from the eternal prison?” Moving those venerable plumes, he said:
“Who guided you? or who has been your lamp In issuing forth out of the night profound, That ever black makes the infernal valley?
The laws of the abyss, are they thus broken? Or is there changed in heaven some council new, That being damned ye come unto my crags?”
Then did my Leader lay his grasp upon me, And with his words, and with his hands and signs, Reverent he made in me my knees and brow;
Then answered him: “I came not of myself; A Lady from Heaven descended, at whose prayers I aided this one with my company.
But since it is thy will more be unfolded Of our condition, how it truly is,
Mine cannot be that this should be denied thee.This one has never his last evening seen, But by his folly was so near to it
That very little time was there to turn.As I have said, I unto him was sent
To rescue him, and other way was none Than this to which I have myself betaken.I’ve shown him all the people of perdition, And now those spirits I intend to show
Who purge themselves beneath thy guardianship.How I have brought him would be long to tell thee. Virtue descendeth from on high that aids me To lead him to behold thee and to hear thee.