All Souls’ Day
Feast day: November 2
All Souls’ Day is a feast day honoring all the faithful departed and is celebrated on November 2, or if this feast falls on a Sunday, November 3. Requiem Masses are celebrated on All Souls’ Day, and religious houses and priests recite the Office of the Dead. Through prayer, intercessions, alms and visits to cemeteries, people commemorate the poor souls in purgatory and attain indulgences for them. The feast was intended to aid the souls of the deceased that are not perfectly cleansed or have not fully atoned for venial sins committed on earth. Offering prayers for those who have died is ancient in origin. The establishment of a fixed November date is often attributed to St. Odilio of Cluny, who, in 998, decreed that all monasteries following the Cluny rule should observe the Office of the Dead on the day after the Feast of All Saints. Soon other religious orders and churches began, on that same date, to annually remember all who had died.
Collect
Listen kindly to our prayers, O Lord,
and, as our faith in your Son,
raised from the dead, is deepened,
so may our hope of resurrection for your departed servants
also find new strength.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever.
