Ecumenical Commemoration
All Souls' Day
November 2
also known as All Souls' Day, Day of the Dead (cultural association)
On 2 November the Church remembers the baptized dead by name and without number. The day was fixed by Odilo, fifth Abbot of Cluny, who ordered an annual commemoration of all the faithful departed throughout his congregation, with alms to the poor and every bell rung. It stands the day after All Saints, and in the Book of Common Prayer 2019 it is an optional ecumenical commemoration.
The day after the Church honours the saints in glory, it turns to the dead nobody has singled out.
That is the whole of it, and it took a monastery to say so. Before the eleventh century, Christians had prayed for their dead for as long as there is record. Tertullian, writing around the year 211, says that "As often as the anniversary comes round, we make offerings for the dead as birthday honours." Cyril of Jerusalem, teaching the newly baptized about the year 350, says that at the altar "we commemorate also those who have fallen asleep before us," and that the offering is made "propitiating our merciful God for them as well as for ourselves." Augustine's mother Monica, dying at Ostia in 387, asked her son for one thing only: "Lay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble you at all. This only I ask, that you will remember me at the Lord's altar, wherever you be."
But the prayers had edges. The commemorations were made for those who belonged: members of the same community, kin, benefactors, those who had earned the favour by gift or friendship. A man with no house behind him and no family to pay had no one appointed to remember him.
Odilo of Cluny, the fifth abbot of that house, ordered his monks to keep an annual commemoration of "all the faithful departed, who have been from the beginning of the world unto the end." The year is not securely known: the traditional date is 998, though the Catholic Encyclopedia's own article on Odilo says the ordinance came "probably not in 998 but after 1030," and no primary act of Cluny fixing either year has been produced. What the decree itself says is not disputed. After chapter, bread and wine were to go to every poor person who came, as on Maundy Thursday; everything left from the brethren's table went whole to the almoner; twelve poor persons were fed; all the bells were rung after vespers; and the abbot invited any other house that wished to copy the practice to share in all Cluny's good works. The feast spread on that invitation, not by any decree of Rome, and no source names the pope or council that later placed it in the Roman books. The monk Burchard, writing to Cluny not long after, reported that no church remained in Germany where the bells were not rung and public and most generous alms given. What people saw was alms and bells.
Two centuries later the Golden Legend states the day's purpose plainly: it is kept for the dead "to the end that they may have general aid and comfort, whereas they may have none special." That is the poor man's clause, written out. In the same book's opening vision, the souls who abound in wealth are those whose friends have succoured them with many aids, and the poor are those "of whom their executors and friends set not by them, ne did nothing for them." Purgatory, in the medieval telling, reproduced the class structure of the living, and this day existed to correct it.
The medieval system that grew around the feast also counted. It reckoned pain in months and debt, and by the sixteenth century that arithmetic was under attack from both directions. Trent, in 1563, ordered bishops to keep subtle questions away from the unlearned and to prohibit whatever savoured "of filthy lucre." In England the day was abolished outright. The Chantries Act of 1547 named "vain opinions of purgatory and masses satisfactory, to be done for them which be departed" as the thing being extinguished; the Forty-Two Articles of 1553 called the doctrine of purgatory "a fond thing, vainly feigned"; and in 1563 a homily was read aloud in parish churches telling congregations that "neither let us dream any more, that the souls of the dead are any thing at all holpen by our prayers." That homily did not simply cancel the day's energy. It redirected it: "let us earnestly and diligently pray for them which are expressly commanded in holy scripture," which is to say the living.
The day came back into an official English book in 1928, in a Prayer Book Parliament twice refused, and it is kept in the Church of England now under a description that has dropped the arithmetic entirely. Common Worship says the day "celebrates the saints in a more local and intimate key," allowing us "to remember with thanksgiving before God those whom we have known more directly: those who gave us life, or who nurtured us in faith." Its central act is the reading of names aloud, with silence kept after each. That is almost exactly what a Cluniac subdeacon did nine hundred years ago, standing behind the altar, reciting the names of the household's friends and of the dead.
The Book of Common Prayer 2019 lists this day but appoints it no collect. What our own book gives instead is the burial rite, and its words at the graveside are the day's words: "Rest eternal grant to him, O Lord; and may his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. And may light perpetual shine upon them."
Augustine, closing the ninth book of the Confessions in Pilkington's rendering, asked that "so many of them as shall read these confessions may at Thy altar remember Monica, Thy handmaid, together with Patricius, her sometime husband." He was not counting anything. He was asking to be held in the memory of people he would never meet, which is what this day is for.
Ask yourself whose name you would say, if the church you sit in read names aloud on 2 November. Most of us can produce two or three without effort, and then the list stops, and behind it stands the far longer roll of the dead nobody in the room knew: the parishioners of a century ago, the man buried at your churchyard's edge with no family left to visit him, the dead of a war whose survivors have themselves died. That was the whole point of the day when a Burgundian abbot set it: it exists for the dead who have no one to speak for them in particular, and its founding instruction was not a doctrine but an alms, bread given at the door to whoever came. What in your own remembering is reserved for the people you loved, and could be widened to include the ones nobody is left to love?
The evidence for this day divides sharply into two bodies eight hundred years apart, and they should not be run together. On one side stands the practice of praying for the dead, attested from the late second century: Tertullian's De Corona (c. 211), the Dinocrates vision in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (c. 203), Cyprian's Epistle 36 (c. 250s), Cyril of Jerusalem's twenty-third Catechetical Lecture (c. 350), and Augustine's Confessions (387; written c. 397 to 400), balanced by Augustine's own restraint in De cura pro mortuis gerenda (c. 421), where funeral rites are "more for comfort of the living, than for help to the dead." The Perpetua passage carries a caveat from its own translators: the editors of the Ante-Nicene Fathers note that Dinocrates was an unbaptized child, so the earliest vivid narrative of relief for the dead is not a clean precedent for the narrower category this feast names. The scriptural warrant most cited, 2 Maccabees 12:38 to 46, is deuterocanonical, canonical for Catholic and Orthodox use and excluded by Article VI from establishing doctrine; that canonical decision is bound up with the Reformation's rejection of purgatory rather than separate from it.
On the other side stands the feast, which is eleventh century and later in the West. The founding text is the Statutum de defunctis attributed to Odilo, printed in Migne's Patrologia Latina, volume 142, columns 1037 to 1038, from a seventeenth-century Cluniac collection: an eleventh-century document reaching us at two removes. Its provisions and its open invitation to imitating houses are quoted above. The year of the decree is genuinely unsettled. The traditional 998 rests on later hagiographic and devotional retelling; the counter-position, "probably not in 998 but after 1030," is a single parenthesis in Klemens Löffler's 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia article on Odilo. No primary Cluniac charter or necrology fixing either year has been located by anyone cited here. One internal detail cuts against 998: the Statutum as printed provides for the memory of "our dear emperor Henry," and Henry II was emperor from 1014 to 1024, whereas in 998 the emperor was Otto III. That clause, however, stands in a provision appended after the decree proper, so it dates the appendix and not necessarily the ordinance.
Why 2 November was chosen is nowhere documented from Odilo himself. Every later source asserts the pairing with All Saints; none traces it to a statement of intent. The choice was not obvious in its own time: Milan adopted the observance under Bishop Otricus between 1120 and 1125 but kept it on 15 October, and the earlier regional commemorations sat elsewhere in the year altogether.
The regional pre-history usually printed for this feast should be handled with care, because it descends almost entirely from one paragraph of Francis Mershman's 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia article: diptychs, a sixth-century Benedictine commemoration at Whitsuntide, Spain in Isidore's time, a Saxon observance on 1 October reported by Widukind of Corvey, Liège as the first diocese to adopt it under Bishop Notger, Besançon, and Milan. That is one modern witness, not a consensus, and it contradicts itself against better evidence at one point: Mershman places the Spanish commemoration on the Saturday before Sexagesima or before Pentecost, while the apparatus in Patrologia Latina 142 has Isidore's Rule prescribing the annual sacrifice the day after Pentecost, and the oldest Auxerre kalendar placing it on 23 January. Nor is the chain internally coherent, since Notger died in 1008, at or before Odilo's own decree on any dating.
The day's oldest custom is an alms. Odilo's statute gave bread and wine to every poor person who arrived, on the pattern of Maundy Thursday, sent the whole surplus of the monks' table to the almoner, and fed twelve poor persons; Burchard reports bells and generous alms across Germany within a generation. John Mirk, preaching to English parishes about 1400, made almsgiving the day's engine, saying that "as water quencheth fire in our sight, right so alms-deed quencheth the fire that burneth them in their pain," and set the bar for prayer as low as it could go: "for the least prayer that is made for them doth them ease," even a man who says only "God have mercy on all christen souls!" Mirk also records the custom already fading: in old time good men and women would buy bread that day and deal it out for the souls they loved, and some still did, but, he says, too few.
Grave-visiting carries the day now. In Poland, Zaduszki fills the cemeteries with candles for days on end, and priests bless the graves; in the Philippines, Undas keeps families at the graves overnight through 1 and 2 November. The French custom of chrysanthemums on graves is often called ancient and is not: it dates to 1919, when Poincaré called for flowers on soldiers' graves for the first Armistice anniversary, and the older French grave-object was a candle. It also belongs properly to All Saints, 1 November, and bleeds onto the second.
Two things commonly attached to this day are not it. Halloween is All Hallows' Eve, the vigil of All Saints, and this day has neither a vigil nor an octave of its own. Mexico's Día de los Muertos is a distinct observance layered onto the same dates, described in UNESCO's 2008 citation as a fusion of pre-Hispanic rites and Catholic feasts, not a Spanish name for the Latin feast. The Eastern churches keep no 2 November: the Byzantine tradition observes movable Saturdays of Souls with blessed kollyva, the Syriac tradition keeps Saturday as the day of the departed because Christ entered Hades on that day, and the Armenian Merelots falls on the Monday after each of five major feasts.
Statutum S. Odilonis de defunctis, in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 142, cols. 1037 to 1038 (printed from the seventeenth-century Bibliotheca Cluniacensis): the founding ordinance, its alms provisions, its clause covering "all the faithful departed, who have been from the beginning of the world unto the end," and the subdeacon's rubric for reciting names. The same volume, at §111, supplies the pre-Odilonian bounded practice; §112 carries Burchard's letter reporting bells and alms in Germany.
*Tertullian, De Corona 3, trans. Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers* III (newadvent.org/fathers/0304.htm): the anniversary offerings.
*Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 23 (Mystagogic 5), §§9 to 10* (newadvent.org/fathers/310123.htm): intercession within the eucharistic prayer.
*Augustine, Confessions IX.11 §27 and IX.13 §§36 to 37, trans. J. G. Pilkington (archive.org, `confessionsofsta011875mbp`, pp. 210 and 216 to 217): Monica's request at Ostia and Augustine's appeal to his future readers. His restraint appears at De cura pro mortuis gerenda* chs. 2, 4 and 6 (newadvent.org/fathers/1316.htm).
*The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, ch. II §§3 to 4, Ante-Nicene Fathers* III (ccel.org): the Dinocrates vision, with the editors' own footnote that the child was unbaptized.
*Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend***, Caxton's English, Temple Classics ed. Ellis, vol. 6, pp. 108 to 121 (archive.org, `TheGoldenLegendV6`): the day's stated purpose, the vision of the rich and poor souls, the Vulcano legend, and the separate vision commanding the pope to establish the day.
*John Mirk, Festial, sermon 65, "In Die Animarum,"* ed. Erbe, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 96 (1905), pp. 269 to 271 (archive.org, `mirksfestialcoll01mirkuoft`): the parish sermon quoted here. The Middle English has been modernized in this article.
*Simon Fish, A Supplication for the Beggars* (1529), Project Gutenberg 32464; and Hugh Latimer, Sermons**, ed. Corrie, Parker Society vol. 1 (archive.org, `sermonsbyhughlat01lati`), pp. 49 to 50 and p. 71: the English case against the day.
*Gee and Hardy, Documents Illustrative of English Church History* (1896): the preamble of the Chantries Act, 1 Edw. VI c. 14. The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549 and A.D. 1552, Parker Society, ed. Ketley (1844), pp. 145 to 148 and p. 532: the 1549 burial texts and the Forty-Two Articles "Of Purgatory." "An Homily concerning Prayer," Third Part*, in Certain Sermons or Homilies* (1563): the instruction to stop praying for the dead and to pray for the living.
Council of Trent, Session XXV, Decree concerning Purgatory, trans. Waterworth (Wikisource); and *Benedict XV, Incruentum Altaris Sacrificium**, Latin text in The Ecclesiastical Review* 53 (1915), pp. 437 to 440: the three-Mass chain from Benedict XIV (1748) and Clement XIII (1761) onward, and the wartime rationale.
The Book of Common Prayer with the Additions and Deviations Proposed in 1928 (archive.org, `bookofcommonpray00chur_20`): the 2 November title, collect, rubric and lections. Hansard, 15 December 1927 and 14 June 1928: both divisions. *Church of England, Common Worship: Times and Seasons, "All Saints to Advent": the "more local and intimate key" description and the reading of names. ACNA, The Book of Common Prayer 2019***: the Calendar of the Christian Year (tier placement), the Collects of the Christian Year (no 2 November entry), and the Burial of the Dead (the Committal versicle quoted here).
*Francis Mershman, "All Souls' Day," Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), and Klemens Löffler, "St. Odilo," Catholic Encyclopedia (1911)* (newadvent.org): the source of the regional pre-history reported with caution above, and of the dating parenthesis on Odilo's decree.
The legends of the feast's origin are pious narrative, not event history, and there are three of them, not one. Burchard's letter tells of a knight of the abbot of Volta, returning from Jerusalem, who loses his way and meets a hermit; the Golden Legend carries a version set on the isle of Vulcano in which Odilo hears devils complain that souls are taken from their hands "by alms and by prayers"; and the vision that opens the same Golden Legend chapter ends with the visionary commanded to show the matter to the pope, so that in its own telling the institution is papal rather than Odilonian. Peter Damian's life of Odilo is a second life, written about 1063 for the elevation of the relics, fifteen years after Odilo's death.
The English suppression is the best-documented stretch of the day's history, and both sides said out loud what they thought was at stake. Simon Fish's Supplication for the Beggars (1529) charged that purgatory was "inuented by the couitousnesse of the spiritualtie onely to translate all kingdomes from other princes vnto theim." Hugh Latimer preached against "our old ancient purgatory pick-purse" and, in the Sermon of the Plough (1548), against a religion that put down "clothing the naked, the poor and impotent" and put up "decking of images." The Chantries Act followed in 1547, the 1549 book reduced the burial rite (removing the versicle "From the gates of hell. Deliver their souls, O Lord," the prayer for the "region of light," and a proper Communion at burials), and the 1553 Articles and the 1563 Homily closed the argument. Article XXII in 1571 narrowed the 1553 wording from "the Doctrine of School authors concerning purgatory" to "The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory." Later Anglican controversialists have argued that the narrowed adjective leaves room to distinguish a commercialized late-medieval doctrine from a patristic belief in post-mortem purification; the Article itself does not make that distinction explicit, and it should be reported as a position held rather than as the Article's meaning. The Long Parliament's 1647 ordinance against festivals is sometimes attached to this day in error: it targeted the surviving Prayer Book calendar, and All Souls had been out of the Anglican kalendar for roughly a century by then.
The Roman side regulated rather than abolished. Trent's Session XXV in December 1563 affirmed the doctrine in a sentence and spent the rest of the decree on preaching restraint and on endowed obligations to be discharged "not in a negligent manner, but diligently and accurately." A privilege of three Masses on the day, long kept in Aragon, was extended by Benedict XIV to Spain and Portugal in 1748 at the request of Ferdinand VI and John V; Clement XIII granted in 1761 that every altar be privileged on the day; Leo XIII declined to universalize the three Masses; and Benedict XV's constitution Incruentum Altaris Sacrificium extended the privilege to every priest in the Latin Church in 1915, motivated in its own Latin by the failure of old Mass foundations and by a war in which "so great a multitude of men, in the flower of their age," were meeting an untimely death. Of the three Masses a stipend might be taken for one only.
In England the day returned in the Prayer Book proposed in 1928, which printed a collect ("O Lord, the maker and redeemer of all believers: Grant to the faithful departed all the unsearchable benefits of thy Son's passion"), the Lesson Revelation 20:11 to 15 and the Gospel John 11:21 to 27, the same Gospel Sarum had appointed for the Requiem. The Commons refused the Measure twice, 238 to 205 in December 1927 and 266 to 220 in June 1928, though prayer for the dead was one item on a long list and reservation of the sacrament was the flashpoint. The observance is carried now in Common Worship (2000). In the Book of Common Prayer 2019 it stands in the Optional Commemorations, Ecumenical column, the lowest of that book's four kalendar tiers, while All Saints' Day on 1 November stands among the Red-Letter Holy Days and the Principal Feasts. It has a calendar slot and no propers of its own.
Almighty God, you have surrounded us with a great cloud of witnesses: Grant that we, encouraged by the good example of your servant Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, may persevere in running the race that is set before us, until at last, with him, we attain to your eternal joy; through Jesus Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/
Readings for a Commemoration
Micah 6:6–8Psalm 11 Corinthians 1:18–31John 3:16–21