Oh! What years of Purgatory will there be for those Christians who have no difficulty at all in deferring their prayers to another time on the excuse of having to do some pressing work! If we really desired the happiness of possessing God, we should avoid the little faults as well as the big ones, since separation from God is so frightful a torment to all these poor souls!
Saint John Vianney
My late paternal grandmother Thelma McClarey was one of the most saintly people I have ever known. Full of joy and peace, she managed to raise 5 rowdy boys, and a rowdier girl, without losing her sanity, much of it being done in the background of the Great Depression and World War II. She and my paternal grandfather Ray had little in the way of material possessions, people do not get rich raising six kids on what a shoe maker and a cleaning lady can make, but love was never in short supply in their home. Like all my relatives on my father’s side, she was a non-denominational Protestant. She knew that Catholics prayed for the dead and she asked me one day to pray for her after she was gone, and I have done so.
Praying for the dead reminds us that love does not let a little thing like death stand in its way. We pray for our beloved in Purgatory so that they may enjoy the Beatific Vision and for our loved ones in Heaven in memoriam and so that they may intercede for us, just as those we love in Purgatory and Heaven pray for us. Thus the bonds of love expressed in prayer keep us linked to those we cannot see, except in priceless memories, and who we long to be reunited with after our days in this Vale of Tears are done.
I confess this one Hail Mary for the repose of a soul in Purgatory who has no one to pray for him and for the repose of the souls of Thelma and Ray McClarey; Alice and Dyke Moore; Rowena Barry; Charles, Ralph and Roscoe McClarey; Betty and Bill Taylor; Mary and Donald McClarey; John Stringer; and Lawrence Charles McClarey.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Please use the comboxes to pray for your cherished dead.
Thanks Don very kind. For Opal, Levi, Dorothy, Leland, Weston, Clayton, Fern, Jay, Louie, Virginia, Roy, Katie, Oliver, Blanche, Charlie, Oliver, Brenda, and one more soul: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus; Holy Mary mother of God[!!!], pray for us sinners now, and in the hour of our death. Amen.
Thank you for posting the words of Saint John Vianney. They perfectly describe what is happening ’round about here. There has been so much change (and so many posts) that fatigue has gained control. This is a good column for stopping to spend moments, although I still wish for a couch to just nap.
I’d like to remember both the yet unnamed and forgotten souls, as well as my paternal and maternal forbears, those I’ve known as friends and acquaintances, and the people others here remember in their prayer.
Also, may God bless us all, somehow.
Something I posted yesterday,
“I had walked to early mass at Saint-Germain-des-Prés and being All Souls Day, the priest requested our charitable prayers for the faithful departed, including, amongst others, “those who lie peacefully here.” After mass I visited a number of the tombs in the church.
There was René Descartes – his name means “born-again” (Renatus). Strange that we have no English equivalent for that Christian name par excellence. His brain, I recalled, is preserved in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris; the irony would not be lost on the philosopher of dualism.
I visited the tomb of Chlothar II, King of all the Franks, who died in 629, more than a thousand years before Descartes. Muhammed had three more years to live. Finally the tombs of Childeric II, his wife, Bilichild and their five year old son, Dagobert, all assassinated, whilst hunting in the forest of Livry, one autumn day in 675, all baptized into the same hope as ourselves. I lit a candle.
Since this church was consecrated in 558, we have had the rise of Islam; the Great Schism; the corruption and disaffection of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance Papacy; the Protestant revolt and the Wars of Religion; Quietism and Jansenism; the Deists and rationalists; the religious nationalism of Gallicanism and Josephism; the Revolution, the Risorgimento, the Ultramontane reaction; and, this morning, a Catholic priest said mass for the Holy Souls in the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.”
Prayer of St. Gertrude for the Souls in Purgatory:
Eternal Father, I offer You the most precious blood of thy Divine Son, Jesus, in union with the Masses said throughout the world today, for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory, for sinners everywhere, for sinners in the universal church, for those in my own home and in my family. Amen.
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