HOMILY for All Souls Day preached in the National Shrine of St John Paul II for the Thomas More Society
In 1529, Simon Fish wrote a tract entitled Supplication for Beggars in which, among other things, he contests the doctrine of Purgatory, and so calls into question the until-then universal Christian piety of praying for the dead which can be traced to the beginnings of the Church. As St Augustine said: “The whole Church observes the custom handed down by our fathers: that those who died within the fellowship of Christ’s body and blood should be prayed for when they are commemorated in their own place at the holy sacrifice”.
Within months of Fish’s publication, then, we find our Saint, Thomas More responding to the novelty and impiety of the Supplication for Beggars with two lengthy books, entitled The Supplication of Souls. Imaginatively written by the Holy Souls in Purgatory, St Thomas More defends the very thing which we gather to do today, and indeed, which Holy Mother Church especially commends to us throughout the month of November. For, in More’s words: “we [i.e., the souls in Purgatory] have been recommended unto God and eased, helped, and relieved both by the private prayers of good virtuous people, and especially by the daily Masses and other ghostly suffrages of priests, religious, and folk of holy church”.
The basis for the belief in praying for the dead is stated somewhat tersely by Saint Thomas Aquinas, who basically argues from the infallible teaching of revelation. He says: “In 2 Maccabees 12:46 we read: ‘It is . . . a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from sins'… But this would not be profitable”, says St Thomas, “unless it were a help to them. Therefore the suffrages of the living profit the dead”. St Thomas does not explain at great length how our prayers help the souls in Purgatory, but he just says that they do help. By way of an explanation he appeals to the bond of charity that unites us in the Church, such that our suffrages, which are our prayers, lovingly offered for the dead in Purgatory, can console and offer relief to the faithful departed. St Thomas More’s purgatorial soul thus says that “in surety of salvation we be fellows with angels; [but] in need of relief we be yet fellows with you”. Hence the Holy Souls, like us, are somehow comforted and soothed by being loved. And this we can understand.
As proof of this, St Thomas More then advances a kind of empirical evidence. He says: “How many have by God's most gracious favour appeared unto their friends after the death and showed themselves helped and delivered hence by pilgrimage, almsdeed, and prayer, and especially by the sacred oblation of that Holy Sacrament offered for them in the Mass.”
Thus encouraged by the experience of the Holy Souls themselves, as well as being fortified by the authority of Scripture and the unbroken testimony of Tradition, we gather, then on All Souls Day. We gather, together with St Thomas More and all the saints to make supplication for the Holy Souls, for those whom we love. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “celebrating the memorial of our salvation strengthens our hope in the resurrection of the body and in the possibility of meeting once again, face to face, those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith”. Hence we pray for the Holy Souls in Purgatory, in the hope that “we will merrily meet in heaven”. Amen.
