This passed Tuesday we celebrated the Feast of All Souls. On this annual Feast Day, the Church offers a special commemoration of the faithful departed. This allows those who mourn the opportunity to pray for loved ones who have died through the Mass, the perfect prayer of the Church. Below is a succinct, clear teaching about assisting the dead to enter heaven and a brief history of the Feast of All Souls.

“Along with the Feast of All Saints developed the Feast of All Souls. The Church has consistently encouraged the offering of prayers and Mass for the souls of the faithful departed in Purgatory. At the time of their death, these souls are not perfectly cleansed of venial sin or have not atoned for past transgressions, and thereby are deprived of the Beatific Vision. The faithful on earth can assist these souls in Purgatory in attaining the Beatific Vision through their prayers, good works, and the offering of Mass.

In the early days of the Church, the names of the faithful departed were posted in Church so that the community would remember them in prayer. In the sixth century, the Benedictine monasteries held a solemn commemoration of deceased members at Whitsuntide, the days following Pentecost. In Spain, St. Isidore (d. 636) attested to a celebration on the Saturday before Sexagesima Sunday (the second Sunday before Lent, the eighth before Easter, in the old calendar). In Germany, Widukind, Abbot of Corvey (d. 980) recorded a special ceremony for the faithful departed on October 1. St. Odilo, the Abbot of Cluny (d. 1048), decreed for all of the Cluniac monasteries that special prayers be offered and the Office of the Dead sung for all of the souls in Purgatory on November 2, the day after All Saints. The Benedictines and Carthusians adopted that same devotion, and soon November 2 was adopted as the Feast of All Souls for the whole Church.” (Catholic Straight Answers, https://catholicstraightanswers.com/what-are-the-origins-of-all-saints-day-and-all-souls-day-are-these-linked-with-paganism -and-halloween/)

From the earliest days of the Church, the apostles and first Catholic disciples spent time in prayer each day and at different times of the day to sanctify the whole day with the presence of the Lord and to glorify God by all that was done throughout the day. This practice was the foundation of what is now known as the Liturgy of the hours and it also was an important part of forming the early Church in its communal life. In this article, I provide some ideas for sanctifying your day through prayer. You will find this very formational and, if you make this a regular practice, you will find your work, activities and family time a means of glorifying God.

In the early days of the Church, disciples of Christ would pray the Our Father daily and some would do it together as a community of faith. After some time, some would do this at five times of the day to make sure they were keeping God in mind and heart as they went about their daily routine. As a result, different prayer forms and habits developed connected with the types of prayer and the time of prayer. There are several types of prayer. First, we must always remember that the Holy Spirit is a part of our prayer. It is through Him that we are able to call out to God as our Father. The five types of prayer are: blessing and adoration, petition, intercession, thanksgiving, and praise. The basic times of prayer that developed were early morning prayer, morning prayer, midday prayer, evening prayer and night prayer.

How can we sanctify the day through prayer? Follow the time-tested model given above. Start your day with an Our Father or another type of formal prayer as you wake up. Do another form of morning prayer like Mass or Eucharistic adoration or the Rosary and grace before breakfast. At lunch time pray the Angelus or an Our Father or the Divine Mercy chaplet (ideally at 3p.m.) as well as grace before the meal. In the evening pray grace before dinner and say an Our Father or the Rosary (ideally with family). At night-time before bed, say prays with your children or spouse including doing an examination of conscience and an act of contrition. These or other forms of prayer spaced throughout the day will make your whole day a gift to God.

I share with you today an excerpt from the Encyclical Fides et Ratio promulgated by St. John Paul II in 1998. In an age of propaganda and  manipulation, I thought it good to begin reflecting on some of the wisdom of this document for our own intellectual and spiritual benefit.  May we have the wisdom and objectivity to seek, find and follow the truth. 

“’All human beings desire to know,’ and truth is the proper object of this desire. Everyday life shows how concerned each of us is to discover  for ourselves, beyond mere opinions, how things really are. Within visible creation, man is the only creature who not only is capable of  knowing but who knows that he knows, and is therefore interested in the real truth of what he perceives. People cannot be genuinely  indifferent to the question of whether what they know is true or not. If they discover that it is false, they reject it; but if they can establish its  truth, they feel themselves rewarded. It is this that Saint Augustine teaches when he writes: ‘I have met many who wanted to deceive, but none  who wanted to be deceived’. It is rightly claimed that persons have reached adulthood when they can distinguish independently between truth  and falsehood, making up their own minds about the objective reality of things. This is what has driven so many enquiries, especially in the  scientific field, which in recent centuries have produced important results, leading to genuine progress for all humanity. 

No less important than research in the theoretical field is research in the practical field—by which I mean the search for truth which looks to  the good which is to be performed. In acting ethically, according to a free and rightly tuned will, the human person sets foot upon the path to  happiness and moves towards perfection. Here too it is a question of truth. It is this conviction which I stressed in my Encyclical  Letter Veritatis Splendor: ‘There is no morality without freedom...Although each individual has a right to be respected in his own journey in  search of the truth, there exists a prior moral obligation, and a grave one at that, to seek the truth and to adhere to it once it is known’.  (Fides et Ratio, #25) 

~Fr. Robert F. McKeon

Last week we looked at one of the theological terms used in the newer translation of the Nicene Creed, the word “consubstantial.” This week we look at another one of these beautiful and profound words that describes the mystery of the Son of God becoming a man.

The Creed reads, “…and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.” The word “incarnate” is a “big”, theological term that beautifully expresses the truth of the mystery of this holy season of Advent. The first thing to mention about this term is that, like the word consubstantial, it has a long history of use in the theology of the church and the Creed. A simple definition of this truth is “to represent in bodily form” or, as an adjective, “invested with a bodily form especially of a human body.” This term as applied to Christ refers to the truth that the Son of God was invested with a human body by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary. The Incarnation expresses the truth of how Jesus, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, became a man. In theological terms the Incarnation means that the one person, Jesus, has two natures. In the Incarnation he is fully human and fully divine.

This truth of our faith is attested to in many places in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. The most obvious passage from Scripture is John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh - and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.” In the Catholic Encyclopedia we read, “The early forms of the creed all make profession of faith, not in one Jesus Who is the Son of God and in another Jesus Who is Man and was crucified, but ‘in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten Son of God, Who became Man for us and was crucified.’ The forms vary, but the substance of each creed invariably attributes to one and the same Jesus Christ the predicates of the Godhead and of man.”

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church we read a beautiful reflection about the effect of the Incarnation, ‘The Word became flesh to make us ‘partakers of the divine nature’: ‘For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.’ ‘For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.’ ‘The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.’” (CCC #460)

Enjoy praying the new words of the Creed. Next week I will look at one final term used in the Apostles Creed. ~Fr. Robert F. McKeon

As we begin the new liturgical year in Advent of 2020, I thought I would take some time to study with you some of the words being used in the Creed in the more recent English translation of what we believe as Catholics. A number of parishioners over the years have mentioned to me the use of the word “consubstantial” now used in the Nicene Creed and so I thought I would start with this word that is used to express and define the meaning of the Blessed Trinity in the Nicene Creed.

The first thing to mention about the use of this term is that it has a long use and tradition in the life of the Church. The Creed we use at Mass is called Nicene because it was developed at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325. It was here that the term consubstantial started to be officially used to describe and explain the union between the Father and the Son in the life of the Holy Trinity. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “Following this apostolic tradition, the Church confessed at the first ecumenical council at Nicaea (325) that the Son is ‘consubstantial’ with the Father, that is, one only God with him. The second ecumenical council, held at Constantinople in 381, kept this expression in its formulation of the Nicene Creed and confessed ‘the only-begotten Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father’" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #242)

Secondly, it is good to know that the word “consubstantial” itself means – of one and the same substance. So, when it is used in the Creed, it simply means the Son of God is of one and same substance as God, the Father. As the Catechism relates, “The Trinity is One. We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons, the ‘consubstantial Trinity’… The divine persons are relative to one another. Because it does not divide the divine unity, the real distinction of the persons from one another resides solely in the relationships which relate them to one another: ‘In the relational names of the persons the Father is related to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to both. While they are called three persons in view of their relations, we believe in one nature or substance.’" (Catechism #253 & #255)

Next week we will study one more term from the Nicene Creed. ~Fr. Robert F. McKeon