Eternal Rest: perpetual light for those we love

IAbout this prayer

These few lines are the Church’s own words for her dead. In the Divine Office for the Dead, the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1909 notes, the verses Requiem æternam and Et lux perpetua took the place of the Glory Be at the end of every psalm. The Raccolta of 1910 prints the prayer twice: the versicle and response alone, indulgenced by Leo XIII in 1902 (no. 414), and with “May they rest in peace” added, indulgenced by Pius X in 1908 (no. 415), in both cases applicable only to the dead. When you pray for one person, say “him” or “her” in place of “them.”

Why pray for the dead? “It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins” (2 Machabees 12:46, Douay-Rheims; 2 Maccabees in modern Bibles). The Church teaches that those who die in God’s grace and friendship but are not yet fully purified are sure of salvation and are purified after death (CCC 1030–1031); and that she has prayed for her dead since her first days, above all by offering the Mass for them, so that they may come, purified, to see God (CCC 1032). The Baltimore Catechism puts it plainly: the faithful on earth can help the souls in Purgatory “by their prayers, fasts, alms-deeds; by indulgences, and by having Masses said for them” (Q. 415).

St. Paul wrote for every widow, every mother who has buried a child, every daughter at a parent’s grave: “we will not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning them that are asleep, that you be not sorrowful, even as others who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:12, Douay-Rheims; 4:13 in modern Bibles). Grief is not forbidden. Hopeless grief is answered.

If you are grieving a baby who died before baptism: of such children the Catechism says that the Church “can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them,” and that God’s great mercy and Christ’s tenderness toward children “allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism” (CCC 1261). Commend your child to that mercy by name.

The same remembrance closes the traditional grace after meals (“may the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God, rest in peace”), so the dead are remembered at every table. November has long been kept as the month of the holy souls: the Raccolta (no. 411) attached indulgences to any daily devotion for them through the month, and the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed is kept on 2 November (Catholic Encyclopedia, “All Souls’ Day”).

IIWhen to pray it

• At a death, a funeral, a graveside, or passing a cemetery.
• Each night, for your own dead by name.
• On the anniversary of a death: a husband’s, a parent’s, a child’s, a friend’s.
• At the end of grace after meals.
• Throughout November, and on 2 November, All Souls’ Day.