Memento Mortuorum

The Catholic Thing

By David G Bonagura, Jr.
Rummaging through my desk last month, I uncovered a single sheet of white paper. A dozen names were written in black ink. I knew immediately what the sheet was for.
Each November, my high school and college almae matres invite their alumni to submit names of deceased loved ones to be remembered at Masses in their chapels. This lost page was my attempt some years ago to list my cloud of witnesses who, for reasons I cannot recall, did not make it to the chapel. But Catholicism is the religion of second chances. With the discovered sheet, the Holy Spirit inspired a new idea.
I scheduled time to visit the Blessed Sacrament, with a black pen and three white sheets of paper. I genuflected, knelt, said a prayer to the Holy Spirit and to my guardian angel to help me recall those who had gone before me and need my prayers. I began to record names.
I proceeded by category. Family first: grandparents, the three great-grandparents whom I knew, great aunts and uncles, my cousin Andrew. Then friends, both my own and those of my parents. Then priests from my parishes and schools. Acquaintances from the town of my youth. Acquaintances in my current town of seventeen years. Victims of September 11 whom I knew. Students. Colleagues. Neighbors. Teachers. Mentors. One hundred and ten people in all.
With each person surfaced a memory, an image of the deceased in action in my life. None of these were overly profound. My five-year-old self hiding under the kitchen table from my grandfather. Everyday actions of colleagues and neighbors. Smiles of students in class. Meals with friends.
These memories bind me to them, and them to me, across the chasm of time. In this month dedicated to the faithful departed, I am fulfilling my duty to each one, which is the final act of our relationship this side of eternity: I pray to God to have mercy on them and to take them to Himself.
At the end of the Apostles' Creed, we profess in succession the Communion of Saints and the forgiveness of sins. The latter, wrought by Christ's blood, makes possible the former. Through baptism we enter the Communion of Saints, for God adopts us as His children. We may not feel very saintly, but we march in that number not because of what we do, but because God has chosen us. Baptism, then, is not an end. It is the beginning of a journey that ends in unmediated union with God, one that we can enter only after we have been purged of every stain of sin.
This is not a task we can complete alone. "The God who created you without you," St. Augustine taught us, "will not save you without you." To this thesis, without meaning any disrespect to the Doctor of Grace, we can add, "And without your brethren."
Our cooperation with God's grace always falls short. We need our fellow Christians, brothers and sisters through baptism, to contribute to our salvation too. They do so in this life through the countless ways they interact with us, for good and for the trying of our patience. And they do so after our deaths through their prayers.
Memento mori, be mindful of death, and indeed we should be this month, as the end of the year and the coming of winter intone the refrain that our ends, too, will come, so we should act accordingly. But at the same time a second command beckons: Memento mortuorum, be mindful of the dead, of those who have gone before us. Our prayers are salutary for them. They are also salutary for us.
With each prayer comes a memory, and with each memory we feel our membership in the Communion of Saints that transcends time. "Society," wrote Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, is a partnership "between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." Born of God rather than the will of men, baptism into the Communion of Saints confers a deeper relationship, for in Christ all - living and dead - are a family together on pilgrimage. Some have already arrived at the destination. Some have barely begun. And ...