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This is a Holy Day of Obligation on which we celebrate the Church
Triumphant -- all the Saints in Heaven, canonized or unknown.
After Noon today, and until Midnight tomorrow, a person who has been to
confession and Communion can gain a plenary indulgence, under the usual conditions,
for the poor souls in Purgatory (who will be commemorated tomorrow)
each time he visits a church or public oratory and recites the Our
Father, the Hail Mary and the Glory be to the Father six times. This is
a special exception to the ordinary law of the Church according to
which a plenary indulgence for the same work can be gained only once a
day. Some of the grave-visiting customs described on the entry for All Souls Day, then, may
begin today in some places.
In anticipation of All Souls' Day tomorrow, when night comes on this
day, we darken the room, light a candle (one blessed at Candlemas if possible), and
pray the Rosary for our dead. Praying the
129th
Psalm (the De Profundis) and/or the Litany of the Saints would also be
lovely.
Reading
On All the
Saints
By St. Gregory Thamaturgus
Grant thy
blessing, Lord.
It was my desire to be silent, and not to make a public display of the
rustic rudeness of my tongue. For silence is a matter of great
consequence when one's speech is mean. And to refrain from utterance is
indeed an admirable thing, where there is lack of training; and verily
he is the highest philosopher who knows how to cover his ignorance by
abstinence from public address. Knowing, therefore, the feebleness of
tongue proper to me, I should have preferred such a course.
Nevertheless the spectacle of the onlookers impels me to speak. Since,
then, this solemnity is a glorious one among our festivals, and the
spectators form a crowded gathering, and our assembly is one of
elevated fervour in the faith, I shall face the task of commencing an
address with confidence. And this I may attempt all the more boldly,
since the Father requests me, and the Church is with me, and the
sainted martyrs with this object strengthen what is weak in me. For
these have inspired aged men to accomplish with much love a long
course, and constrained them to support their failing steps by the
staff of the word; and they have stimulated women to finish their
course like the young men, and have brought to this, too, those of
tender years, yea, even creeping children. In this wise have the
martyrs shown their power, leaping with joy in the presence of death,
laughing at the sword, making sport of the wrath of princes, grasping
at death as the producer of deathlessness, making victory their own by
their fall, through the body taking their leap to heaven, suffering
their members to be scattered abroad in order that they might hold
their souls, and, bursting the bars of life, that they might open the.
gates of heaven.
And if any one believes not that death is abolished, that Hades is
trodden under foot, that the chains thereof are broken, that the tyrant
is bound, let him look on the martyrs disporting themselves in the
presence of death, and taking up the jubilant strain of the victory of
Christ. O the marvel! Since the hour when Christ despoiled Hades, men
have danced in triumph over death. "O death, where is thy sting! O
grave, where is thy victory?" Hades and the devil have been despoiled,
and stripped of their ancient armour, and cast out of their peculiar
power. And even as Goliath had his head cut off with his own sword, so
also is the devil, who has been the father of death, put to rout
through death; and he finds that the selfsame thing which he was wont
to use as the ready weapon of his deceit, has become the mighty
instrument of his own destruction.
Yea, if we may so speak, casting his hook at the Godhead, and seizing
the wonted enjoyment of the baited pleasure, he is himself manifestly
caught while he deems himself the captor, and discovers that in place
of the man he has touched the God. By reason thereof do the martyrs
leap upon the head of the dragon, and despise every species of torment.
For since the second Adam has brought up the first Adam out of the
deeps of Hades, as Jonah was delivered out of the whale, and has set
forth him who was deceived as a citizen of heaven to the shame of the
deceiver, the gates of Hades have been shut, and the gates of heaven
have been opened, so as to offer an unimpeded entrance to those who
rise thither in faith.
In olden time Jacob beheld a ladder erected reaching to heaven, and the
angels of God ascending and descending upon it. But now, having been
made man for man's sake, He who is the Friend of man has crushed with
the foot of His divinity him who is the enemy of man, and has borne up
the man with the hand of His Christhood, and has made the trackless
ether to be trodden by the feet of man. Then the angels were ascending
and descending; but now the Angel of the great counsel neither
ascendeth nor descendeth: for whence or where shall He change His
position, who is present everywhere, and filleth all things, and holds
in His hand the ends. of the world? Once, indeed, He descended, and
once He ascended,--not, however, through any change of nature, but only
in the condescension of His philanthropic Christhood; and He is seated
as the Word with the Father, and as the Word He dwells in the womb, and
as the Word He is found everywhere, and is never separated from the God
of the universe.
Aforetime did the devil deride the nature of man with great laughter,
and he has had his joy over the times of our calamity as his
festal-days. But the laughter is only a three days' pleasure, while the
wailing is eternal; and his great laughter has prepared for him a
greater wailing and ceaseless tears, and inconsolable weeping, and a
sword in his heart. This sword did our Leader forge against the enemy
with fire in the virgin furnace, in such wise and after such fashion as
He willed, and gave it its point by the energy of His invincible
divinity, and dipped it in the water of an undefiled baptism, and
sharpened it by sufferings without passion in them, and made it bright
by the mystical resurrection; and herewith by Himself He put to death
the vengeful adversary, together with his whole host.
What manner of word, therefore, will express our joy or his misery? For
he who was once an archangel is now a devil; he who once lived in
heaven is now seen crawling like a serpent upon earth; he who once was
jubilant with the cherubim, is now shut up in pain in the guard-house
of swine; and him, too, in fine, shall we put to rout if we mind those
things which are contrary to his choice, by the grace and kindness of
our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory and the power unto the ages
of the ages. Amen.
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