In the Catholic Church, the month of November is dedicated to praying for the dead. Today priests around the world are given special permission to say three Masses – one for the Pope, one for the dead and one for a personal intention. It is also customary to visit family graves on this day. In some Spanish speaking countries – such as Mexico – this has evolved into a pious national festival known as the “Day of the Dead.”
The Pope said that a visit to the cemetery “to pray for loved ones who have left us” is a good reminder of the “Communion of Saints” and that there is a “close link between we who still walk upon the earth and our countless brothers and sisters who have already reached eternity.”
And yet many of us still fear death, observed the Pope, giving three reasons why this is the case. He pointed to fear of the unknown, the apparent destruction of “all that was beautiful and great” in our lifetime, and also a fear of judgement, in particularly for those actions that “with skill, we often remove or attempt to remove from our consciousness.”
The Pope said that modern society often tries to approach death using the “criteria of scientific experimentalism,” so that the “great question of death must be answered not with faith, but with testable, empirical knowledge.”
But this approach, he cautioned, can end up in a form of spiritualism where, in an attempt to have contact with the world beyond death, we almost imagine “a reality” that is “a copy of the present.”
This worldview reduces man to “a horizontal dimension” and causes life to lose “its deeper meaning.”