Prayer for the dead

Bishop Scott Bullock
The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed
November 2, 2025

One of the most beloved members of my family was my Great Aunt Millie, the woman after whom my mother was named. In 1995, my aunt, after a long, faithful life, was approaching her death in a beautiful nursing home in Lake Orion, Michigan. Suddenly, a theological dispute broke out! The adult girl whom Millie had taken into her home as a teenager when both of her parents, my grandparents, had died, sat by her bedside. That was my mother. Knowing of my aunt’s long life of interceding in prayer for all of her family, my mother decided that Aunt Millie would be comforted by the Rosary, the prayer by which across her rosary beads, Millie had nearly worn her fingers to the bone through the years. I sure know she prayed me through seminary. Together in the room with Aunt Millie and my mother Mildred was an acquaintance of the family, God love her, who had great devotion to my aunt. When Mom suggested that it was time for Millie’s favorite prayer, the Rosary, the acquaintance was reported to have said, “What good will that do?”   

My mother told me her response, without anger, was simply: “Since Millie prayed this prayer for us her whole life, we owe it to her now.” 

Here then, on my aunt’s deathbed, surfaced one of the great theological disputes of Christian history — the prayer for the dead. Some even question the value of the necessity of praying for folks once they’ve died. For example, a blogger I found recently wrote: “Our prayers (for the dead) have no bearing on someone once he or she has died. The reality is that, at the point of death, one’s eternal destiny is confirmed. Either he is saved through faith in Christ and is in heaven where he is experiencing rest and joy in God’s presence, or he is in torment in hell.”

Yet, our Catholic tradition richly embraces, instead, prayer for the dead, like we are doing today in this Mass. Since our dead are in God’s hands, why would we pray for them? The opposition to such prayer, it seems to me, is based on a kind of severe individualistic understanding of one’s relationship to Christ and salvation that comes through some pristine individual act of faith. 

If I have made this act of faith, opponents of such prayer say, I am safe in the saving hands of God. Yet, faith is never a solitary act, is it? I didn’t discover Jesus on my own, my family and teachers told me about him. I don’t live my life of faith alone, but always with others. We need others and they need us for a life in Christ.

So, no surprise, at the moment of an approaching death of a loved one, we instinctively want to take our beloved to the Lord in prayer. Or, more precisely, we ask the Lord to take our loved one to himself. In fact, the instinct to pray for the dead has support throughout the Scriptures. Most famously, the Old Testament book of Second Maccabees says that prayer for the dead is “a holy and pious thought.” 

St. Paul prays for a deceased brother in Christ, one called Onisiphorus: when he says, “May the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that Day.” 

Our instinct of faith to pray for those who have died, to commend them to God and ask him to take them to himself is natural. And, the Eucharist is the prayer when Christ comes to take us to himself.  

While all prayer is powerful, none is more sure and powerful than the prayer of Jesus himself, the Eucharist, when the single saving sacrifice of Jesus comes to us again, and where his promise “when I am raised up, I will gather all to myself” happens again and again. It’s in this raising us up with him in his saving cross and resurrection to which Jesus refers in today’s Gospel, when he promises, “Everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life, and I shall raise him on the last day.” So, when we put our faith in Jesus, crucified and risen, he promises us he will take us through the cross, that is his death, and raise us with his resurrection! And we commend each other to that saving death and resurrection of Jesus. 

What we are doing today is what believers have done since the beginning of our faith: remembering our beloved dead to the Lord in the only way we know they can be saved through the Lord himself, who, in this prayer of the Eucharist, the sacrifice of the Mass, gathers us to all to himself.

What good will this do? The better question is what good will Jesus do through this perfect prayer of Jesus, the Eucharist? What he has promised us he will do, if we do this in remembrance of him. That is that he will gather us to himself, raise us up with him, and deliver us to eternal life. So, Lord, receive our beloved dead, according to your promise, and as you are raised up in the Cross and the resurrection, gather all of them to yourself.