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Do The Dead live ?

By

JOSEPH McSORLEY
0/ the Paulist Fathers

New York

THE PAULIST PRESS
401 West 59th Street



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I This pamphlet, Do the Dead Live?

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Good Heart by Joseph McSorley of I

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the Paulist Fathers, with the kind I

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permission of P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1

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PRINTED AND PUBLISHED IN THE U. S. A.
BY THE PAULIST PRESS, NEW YORK, N. Y.



?51H

DO THE DEAD LIVE?

HE best index to a man’s mind is

his conduct. Watch the behav-

ior of your friend when at work;

watch him in his leisure hours;

him when he is crossed, or

tempted, or tired, or defeated, or tri-

umphant. You will thus learn more

about the excellences and the defects of

his character, the trend of his thoughts,

the nature of his ambitions, the proba-

bility of his success, than could be gath-

ered from his sincerest attempt to ana-

lyze for you his mental and moral dis-

position.

So it is with an organization of men.

So it is therefore with the Church,

formed to conserve and to declare and

to apply the truth delivered by Christ.

[1]

watch



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

Watch her conduct. Mark the purpose

of her feasts, and the manner in which

she celebrates them. Note her ways of

developing spiritual life in the soul.

Observe her practical bearing toward the

great haunting facts of human experi-

ence— growth, responsibility, tempta-
tion, sin, death. Thus you will learn

much more about her real self than you

could hope to obtain from the most mi-

nute study of her definitions and profes-

sions of faith.

Now, on All Souls’ Day, as it is called,

the Catholic Church makes a rather

extraordinary manifestation of her

mind. With very unusual insistence she

then summons the faithful to remember

and to assist their brethren who are

dead. Unique in Office and in Mass, is

her Commemoration of All the Faith-

ful Departed.

On our imaginations the Liturgy then

imprints the pictures of those who, going

[ 2 ]



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

before us into the valley of the shadow,

have passed away in the friendship of

Christ. There is general mourning.

The wide world witnesses one great uni-

versal funeral service. The chant is a

solemn dirge; the prayer begs the gift of

eternal rest and perpetual light for the

souls of the blessed dead; the Mass is the

Mass of Requiem.

Nowhere within the far-stretching

borders of her domain, will living man

be utterly forgetful of the dead that day.

Among all nations and in every place

there will be offered the sacrifice of

propitiation for the past sins and frail-

ties of those who have died in the Lord.

Graves will be visited. You will see a

tear of remembrance on the mother’s

face. The father will kneel down to

pray again at the grave of his son. The

widow of twenty years ago will visit the

tomb of her husband and murmur the

prayer of a love not yet grown cold.

[3]



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

For these are children of a Mother who

teaches that “it is a holy and wholesome

thought to pray for the dead.”

All this implies that a bond wonder-

fully firm and wonderfully lasting knits

together those that have gone and those

that still remain; that there is a union

between souls which the power of death

is helpless to destroy.

That there is purgation after death,

that souls passing out of this life with

even the slightest moral taint must suf-

fer an experience of purifying pain

—

this doctrine is the basis of the Catholic

observance of All Souls’ Day.

How reasonable it appears to the

Christian mind! The best of us are im-

perfect, and the purest somewhat

stained. Those we love and revere

most, those we deem worthy of the high-

est gifts of earth, the men and women

who shine out as leaders of the strong

and saviours of the weak, even they do

[ 4 ]



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

not seem holy as God is holy. Some

lurking flaw, some almost invisible de-

fect, some lingering imperfection clings

to the most perfect of them. One alone

is good—God!
Even though we are lying stunned un-

der the shock of a dear one’s death, even

though we are crying out in wild protest

against the decree which has snatched

away a life unreservedly heavenly in its

influence on our own—even then, we
have but to gaze for an instant toward

the all perfect God, and at once we real-

ize that our purest and our noblest and

our best beloved are weak and faulty

in His sight, and that all humankind

needs mercy and pardon and the grace

of divine forgiveness.

And how consoling is the doctrine

which enables us to reconcile our keen

appreciation of God’s ineffable sanctity

with the conviction that those we love

shall yet enter into His presence and be

[ 5 ]



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

made one with Him. How uplifting is

the faith which gives us reason to believe

that some mysterious process purges and

refines the souls of the beloved dead un-

til they become fit to repose in the bosom

of the All Holy, where defilement and

imperfection are inconceivable.

Again, what a blessed thing it is that

we who remain behind are able to help

those who have gone before. Is there

any deeper instinct than that to which

this ability affords satisfaction? When

they have passed out of sight and no vis-

ible bond unites us to them, the purity

of our affection is actually an aggrava-

tion of our pain. We are well nigh

crazed at being so distant and so help-

less, and sometimes even self-destruc-

tion would seem inviting to us in the

madness of our grief. But who shall de-

scribe our happiness, if there come to us

a divine messenger to whisper of the

dear one dead, to assure us he is within

[ 6 ]



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

the shadow of the throne of God, to tell

us even that we may help him.

And this is the second belief implied

in the Commemoration of All Souls’

—

that we who still abide in the flesh may,

by our prayers and good deeds, aid

those who have gone before.

When all has been said, was there

ever a generation more irrepressibly hu-

man than our own? Men were sterner

in the days of old, and more brave per-

haps. They bore pain better, they faced

death with greater readiness, and they

shuddered less at torture and at blood.

But one cannot believe that they loved

more deeply or that they felt the shock

of separation more keenly than we.

Women clung around their dead, it is

true, in the ages gone by; and strong

men often wept over the graves of chil-

dren; and on each generation, as it

passed away, there were laid the tokens

of lasting remembrance and imperish-

[ 7 ]



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

able affection. But out of the very

strength our ancestors possessed, it

would seem, there must have sprung a

greater power of resistance than that

which nature gives to us.

Whether that be so or not, this at least

is clear, that we nowadays are totally in-

capable of bearing death’s cruel blows

without the assistance of religion. Our

dead belong to us and we refuse to be-

lieve that we have been forever sepa-

rated from or that we are helpless to

do aught for them. Almost as if in re-

ply to an imperious demand of ours the

Church’s voice declares “the prayers of

the living avail to aid the souls of them

that are dead.”

It is wide in its sweep, this principle

of Catholic teaching. It proclaims that

there are no walls of partition between

the souls of the just, either on this side

of the tomb or beyond.

There is one wonderful body, one

[81



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

Kingdom of God. Through every re-

gion of it, militant, suffering, triumph-

ant, course life-giving currents of com-

mon sympathy and common grace.

Part is closely bound to part; and nei-

ther sorrow, nor pain, nor death can dis-

solve the strong bond of fellowship unit-

ing member with member. As the Chris-

tian can never rejoice, so he can never

suffer, entirely alone. Whether he lives

or whether he dies, he is a member of

Christ’s Body, so to remain throughout

eternity.

This Catholic conception of solidarity

is immeasurably beyond the highest

hope of humanitarianism. In contrast

with ambition and selfishness, it sets up

the divinely beautiful ideal of charity.

It reveals in the soul of the Christian a

depth and a constancy of affection such

as reason of itself could neither antici-

pate nor comprehend. It preaches the

interdependence of man with man so im-

[ 9 ]



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

pressively that the poorest cannot excuse

himself by pleading inability to aid, nor

can the strong soul say to the weak, “I

have no need of thee.” When the Hand

of the Lord has touched us, then we are

glad to call any man friend; we beseech

each passer-by to have pity on us; and

we no longer feel it beneath our dig-

nity to beg for a drop of cooling water

from the beggar who once lay at our

gates.

Looking forward to a condition of

helpless suffering as the inevitable, even

though temporary, lot of all who finally

enter the approaches of eternal life, the

Catholic learns valuable lessons about

human equality. He perceives how lit-

erally and how strikingly God puts down

the mighty and exalts the humble. He

understands how intimate a sympathy

pervades the human members of Christ’s

Body. And though we dare not say that

alwavs and in all circumstances this les-*

[10]



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

son is assimilated by the individual

Catholic, we can assert, without fear of

challenge or denial, that the teaching in

question is a strong influence for good

in the lives of those who appreciate its

implications and follow the impulses it

suggests.

We who believe this teaching of the

Church, then, can say, without a shadow

of insincerity:

“Those we love truly never die.”

In reinforcement of our nature’s aspi-

ration there comes the solemn pro-

nouncement of the defining Church, pu-

rifying and ennobling our purest and

noblest loves, until the sacred influence

of a union transcending time and space

and the things of the flesh brings into

our lives something of the peace and

holiness of heaven. Amid cries of lam-

entation there resounds again an echo of

the promise, “He shall not taste death

forever.”

[ 11 ]



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

Supported on the broad bosom of the

Church, which defies the power of death,

we feel comforted and consoled amid

the heaviest of human afflictions. Per-

meated with a sense of those wholesome

teachings which are held up for our

careful study, we are able to shape our

souls into at least a rough conformity

with the spirit of Christ and to bow re-

signedly to God’s judgments.

Although the effect of the Church’s

teaching in this matter be not plain in

the life of each one of her children, yet,

on the whole, the general consequence

of her influence is easily discernible.

Who else is so brave as the Catholic at

the approach of death, so reverent at the

awful moment when the soul departs, so

tender and so constant in the care of the

mortal frame which has been the dwell-

ing place of a still living soul? Who else

remembers the dead as the Catholic

does? What other mourner possesses

[ 12 ]



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

ties so consoling and so intimate as the

Catholic praying for his beloved?

It has been given to this generation to

witness some very striking instances of

human craving for communion with the

dead. To wish for an assurance that the

dead are still our dead, to seek hungrily

for a way of reaching out beyond the in-

tolerable confines of this petty world, to

long with quenchless longing that some

act of ours may avail to satisfy some de-

sire of theirs—these are the yearnings
common to all on whom bereavement

lays its heavy hand.

Spiritism in its thousand forms is an

attempt to meet this real need. But

spiritism has not been justified in its re-

sults, nor can it ever be more than a poor

substitute for that wholesome consola-

tion which has always been within the

reach of the Catholic Christian.

Here again we have an instance of

what the Church does for her children so

[ 13 ]



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

many times and in such various ways

—

she realizes the ideal, she makes con-

crete and tangible and attainable what

mystic and poet have dreamed and sung

about for ages. That quenchless desire

of noblest natures to commune with and

to assist the departed is not only recog-

nized by the Church, but met and satis-

fied.

Look around, and on every hand you

will see men and women whose aspira-

tions have been guided, as they have

been ennobled, by this teaching of the

Catholic religion; for generous response

to the Church’s suggestion ever brings

practical definite moral benefit. Often

our eyes are lifted from the trying scenes

of earth to that province of Christ’s

Kingdom which lies beyond; often the

music of invisible choirs imparts to us

a thrill of inspiration; often we are

strengthened and saved by the convic-

tion that the thoughts we conceive and

[ 14 ]



DO THE DEAD LIVE ?

the deeds we do will affect not only our

own private destiny, but the happiness

of those who have gone before.



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