Tag Archive for ‘All Souls’
Rejoicing in the Communion of Saints
This month we celebrate All Saints and pray for the souls in purgatory. The people we love who have died probably had as many shortcomings, quirks, neuroses and downright failures as we do. I find that a consoling thought. Because they persevered in living their faith, which gives me hope that I can and will […]
Monday 2 November
All Souls Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 27; Romans 5:5-11; Luke 7: 11-17 Hopeful hearts It is very comforting to know that Jesus Christ is with us when we meet the death of loved ones and when we come to face our own death. Our hope that we will go on sharing life with our loved ones […]
Celebrating All Saints and All Souls
Pope Francis, 1 November 2019 Today’s solemnity of All Saints reminds us that we are all called to holiness. The Saints of all times, whom today we celebrate all together, are not simply symbols, distant, unreachable human beings. On the contrary, they are people who lived with their feet on the ground. They experienced the […]
All Saints and All Souls Days
All Saints’ Day The Book of Revelation refers to an essential characteristic of saints, saying they are people who belong totally to God. They are presented as an immense multitude of “chosen ones,” dressed in white and marked with the “seal of God” (See Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14). Through this last detail, with allegorical language, it […]
All Soul’s Day
The priest was working as a chaplain in a New York hospital. One of the patients never received any visitors. She told the chaplain to stop bothering her with his visits: ‘Look, son, I don’t need professional mourners. Don’t be doing your duty on me. There’s plenty of people to exercise yourself on – go […]
All Saints and All Souls
The cover drawing is a creative rendition of some of the graves on top of Pukekaraka, Ōtaki. The graves of Fr Melu and Brother Stanislaus are seen with the hopeful signs of spring blossom. The artist is Fr Peter Healy sm, who lives in Ōtaki and ministers on the Kapiti Coast. I saw a huge […]
Why do Catholics pray for the dead?
The earliest Scriptural reference to prayers for the dead comes in the second book of Maccabees. The books of Maccabees recount the struggle of the Jewish people for freedom against the Seleucid Empire, around 100-200 years before the birth of Christ. They were written from an Orthodox Jewish point of view. In the second book […]
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