Homily for the Mass of the Faithful Departed

Sunday 2 November 2025
Commemoration of the Faithful Departed – Year C

Homily by Father Emmanuel Schwab

1^st Reading: Job 19:1, 23-27a
Psalm 26(27)
2^rd reading: Romans 6,1:11-XNUMX
Gospel: Mark 15:33-34a, c37; 16:1-6

This day is a day of prayer for the dead. But what does it mean to pray for our deceased loved ones, and how do we do it? This prayer for our deceased is not very different from prayer for ourselves, since it is about welcoming the salvation that Christ Jesus won for us in his death and resurrection. "For us men and for our salvation, he came down from Heaven," we say in the CredoAnd all that follows—his death and resurrection—is “for us men and for our salvation”—and we know this well: it is for each of us, personally. Ultimately, the essence of our prayer is to say to the Lord: what you have done for me, I consent to and I let you do. I let you take the lead in my life. 

Our prayer for the deceased is to unite ourselves to their prayer and to say to the Lord: what you have done for each of them, we consent to. Our relationship to Salvation is always one of welcome, an attitude of receptivity. And I quote a few words from Thérèse in a letter to her inevitable sister Céline, letter 142, where she tells her:

Merit does not consist in doing or giving much, but rather in receiving, in loving much… It is said that it is much sweeter to give than to receive, and that is true, but then, when Jesus wants to take for Himself the sweetness of giving, it would not be gracious to refuse. Let us allow Him to take and give all that He wills; perfection consists in doing His will, and the soul that gives itself entirely to Him is called by Jesus Himself “His Mother, His Sister,” and His whole family. (LT 142 of July 6, 1893, to Céline)

Let us allow Jesus the gentleness of giving, and thus let us accept to receive. And one way to signify that it is indeed Jesus who acts to save us is to celebrate the Eucharist, for in the mystery of the Eucharist, we are made present to the event of Christ's death and resurrection. What was accomplished "for us men and for our salvation" in the death and resurrection of Jesus is made present to us in the celebration of the Eucharist. And thus, we receive this gift of salvation. 

The custom of having Masses celebrated for the dead is a way of welcoming, in solidarity with them, in the communion of saints, the grace of Salvation for our departed. And it is a blessed custom to have Mass celebrated for the dead. The accompanying offering is a way of signifying the offering of our own lives to receive this Salvation. One does not “buy” a Mass, and it makes little sense to have a Mass said and then lose interest once the offering has been given. 

The aim of prayer is indeed to unite oneself to the celebration of this Eucharist, either by being present or remotely, in order to truly welcome, in prayer, the grace of God. 

In this celebration of the Eucharist, all of Heaven is present. For what is Heaven? Jesus rose again in our humanity. He is man, “entirely like us, except for sin,” says the Letter to the Hebrews (4:15). It is indeed in this unique humanity that he lived and rose again, and it is indeed this humanity that is present in God. And we, through baptism, have been united with Christ, as we heard in the second reading: All of us who have been united to Christ Jesus through baptism, to already share in the resurrection of Jesus, we became members of his bodyHeaven is Jesus. And so, when we celebrate the Eucharist, all of Heaven is present, all those who are, as it were, sheltered in the Body of Christ, awaiting the final resurrection. Thérèse had this intuition very early on. She received her First Communion on May 8, 1884, when she was 11 years old, and she experienced this First Communion very intensely—she even used the word “fusion” with Jesus: we were one—and she began to cry. In all the major events of her life, in her writings, she began to speak of herself in the third person, as if she were looking at herself. So she says:

Her joy was too great, too profound for her to contain; delightful tears soon flooded her, to the great astonishment of her companions, who later said to one another, "Why did she cry? Wasn't something bothering her?... — No, it was rather not seeing her Mother beside her, or her beloved Sister, who is a Carmelite." They couldn't understand how all the joy of Heaven coming into a heart, that exiled heart, could not bear without shedding tears... Oh! no, Mother's absence didn't grieve me on the day of my First Communion: wasn't Heaven already in my soul, and hadn't Mother long since taken her place there? Thus, in receiving the visit of Jesus, I also received that of my beloved Mother who blessed me, rejoicing in my happiness… (Ms A Folio 35) There is no place where we are closer to our departed loved ones than the Eucharist, the celebration of the Eucharist, the partaking of the Eucharist, or prayer before the tabernacle. We are closer to our departed loved ones before the tabernacle than before their tombs. This does not mean that it is not good to visit the tombs of our departed… but we are closer to them before the tabernacle. But this is not a felt presence; it is a presence in faith. It is no more felt than the presence of the Lord Jesus. It is in faith that we know the Lord is there in the Eucharist. It is through faith that we know our deceased loved ones, whom we hope are not in hell, are safely sheltered in the body of Christ and are mysteriously present. And it is not madness to speak to our deceased without expecting anything in return… They have not vanished into nothingness. And it is normal to have a connection with them from the moment we accept that they are dead, that is, that they are no longer with us, and that this is not a way of ultimately denying this dramatic, traumatic event of death. For we all experience the real absence of our deceased loved ones. And while time lessens the pain, sometimes certain events, certain words, certain memories rekindle the absence that we feel more deeply. This is the moment to entrust ourselves to the Lord Jesus, to offer our deceased loved ones again so that He may watch over them. 

Finally, as I said at the beginning of this mass, one day we are going to die. 

Thérèse experienced her first hemoptysis, her coughing up of blood, on the night of Holy Thursday to Good Friday in 1896. And then she said to herself: That's it, I'm going to die, hooray, I'm going to meet Jesus again! (free translation But she died on September 30, 1897. So, in fact, one could say that she took 18 months to die. 18 months to prepare herself to let the Lord act. And as she says, I wouldn't want to anticipate that moment by a single second, through my own actions, because she is aware that it is truly Jesus who acts. And Jesus is presented, presents himself, in certain parables of the Gospel, as the thief. You know: if the owner of a house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would have watched his house (cf. Mt 24:43). And Thérèse plays with this, especially in June and July 1897, when she speaks of the thief on many occasions. On June 9, she says, it's in the Yellow Notebook:

It says in the Gospel that the good Lord will come like a thief. He will come and steal from me, all very gently. Oh! How I would love to help the Thief!

And then a little later that same day:

I am not afraid of the thief… I see him from afar, and I am careful not to shout, “Thief!” On the contrary, I call to him, saying, “This way! This way!” (Judges 9 June, 1.4)

This is also Thérèse's playful, childlike humor, but what she's actually saying is extremely profound: she's saying that she's waiting for that moment of encounter. And as I said yesterday, when I said that God leads us on the path to holiness by stripping us bare, to arrive at our mortal remains, it's also about us, right now, preparing ourselves for that day by allowing ourselves to be stripped little by little, so that we can give ourselves entirely and let ourselves be taken in Jesus' arms so that he can lead us to the Father. It's not only on the day of our death that we'll have to live this; it's right now that we must learn to do it, day after day.

And Mother Agnes asks Thérèse the question: 

Are you afraid of the Thief? This time he's at the door!

It is the beginning of July. Thérèse replies:

No, he's not at the door, he's already come in.

Magnificent! He's not at the door. He's already inside. He's already here, the thief. He's already inside me. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." Paul said (Galatians 2:20), and Thérèse could say, and I hope we can each say: It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.It is not the result of my efforts that allows me to say this, it is what God does for me, that Christ lives in me. 

And Thérèse continues:

But what are you saying, my dear Mother! If I'm afraid of the Thief! How can you expect me to be afraid of someone I love so much?! 

But at the same time, due to tuberculosis and the suffocation that resulted from it, Thérèse experienced terrible pains, terrible physical suffering. And in the notes taken by Mother Agnes, Thérèse reportedly said, one day in August 1897:

Take good care, Mother, when you have patients suffering from such violent pain, not to leave any poisonous medicines near them. I assure you that when one suffers to this extent, it only takes a moment to lose one's mind. And then one could very easily poison oneself. (Other words to Mother Agnes – August 97)

We must understand this. And if we are called by the very meaning of life, of human life, to resist the temptations of what is called “euthanasia,” which is an elegant way of saying that we are going to intentionally cause someone's death, we must understand that this temptation to end things at certain times is a real temptation that must be met with infinite compassion and tenderness. We cannot, on the one hand, say that euthanasia is wrong, without finding ways to invest ourselves in accompanying the sick who are suffering. For there is a great loneliness in this suffering, and I believe that in certain situations only the Lord can enter into it. Only the Lord can reach us in the depths of suffering. 

We will die one day, and that is a joy. It is the day when we can finally cross over to God's side, and we joyfully prepare ourselves for it, not to die and go to the cemetery, but to enter into the fullness of life.

"I am not dying, I am entering into life," Thérèse wrote to Abbé Bélière. 

And on July 31st, she exclaimed:

The Thief Will Come
And will carry me away
Alleluia! 
(CJ July 31, 10)