November

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
7 Nov 2010

November is the month when Catholics remember their dead as the month begins with the feast of All Saints (those in heaven) and then the feast of All Souls (those on their way to heaven).

Catholics also believe in a unity between the living and the dead, sometimes called the communion of saints, highlighting our different approach from the Protestants.

Unlike the ancient Greek and Roman pagans, the Buddhists and Hindus all Christians believe in the resurrection of the body rather than a simple continuity of the individual soul or some form of reincarnation, perhaps as an animal.

Over the centuries religious groups have existed which claimed that material creation, including the human body, was evil, that only the spiritual is good and pure.  Christians believe in the goodness of all creation including the human body, although it is imperfect and a spiritual flaw runs through the human heart (original sin).

On the last day, as well as the clouds of witnesses from across the thousands of years of human history, Christ will inaugurate a new creation, a new and different heaven and earth, where we shall find no tinea, piles or dandruff, no evil, sadness or weeping.  This belief is common to all Christians.  So too Christians are united in affirming that Christ is the unique mediator, the only redeemer of all those saved.

Then the differences begin, because Protestants generally are not enthusiastic about saints and do not believe in a place of purification after death for those who are imperfect and still unworthy to enter the fullness of God's presence, a state Catholics call purgatory.

The communion of saints has many levels of meaning.  In heaven God's love, issuing especially through Christ His Son will be the crucial antidote to human loneliness, supported by the mutual love among the saved.  On the other hand Pope Benedict believes that a total loneliness, which cannot or will not be penetrated, would be one of the elements of hell.

Catholics and Orthodox believe in the reality of a two-way traffic across the communion of saints, whereby the living pray for the deceased so that their purification might be hastened or completed and sometimes ask the saints to use their merits, and good standing with Christ to intercede with Him to help the dead or support some human project.

Catholics believe the saints can help us and ask them to do so.