At Catholic funerals now, somebody usually says it. A cousin, a colleague, sometimes a friend handed the microphone after Communion. He is in a better place. It is meant kindly, and it is almost always said by someone who loved the man. It also closes off the only work the living had left to do for him.
There was a time when Catholics did not say that at a funeral. They had something else to offer: a Mass, applied by name, on the third day and the seventh and the thirtieth, and then every year on the anniversary for as long as anyone was left to ask for it. That practice had proper texts, a place on the parish calendar, and a vocabulary of its own. Most Catholics under sixty have been to a funeral. Almost none of them have seen the schedule.
What a Requiem actually is
A Requiem is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, offered and applied for a particular soul who has died. It is not a musical genre and not a style of funeral, whatever Verdi and the funeral homes have done to the word. Everything else follows from that.
It takes its name from the first word of its Introit: Réquiem ætérnam dona eis, Dómine: et lux perpétua lúceat eis. Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. The Missal heads that Introit, and the Gradual with it, 4 Esdras 2:34–35, a book which stands outside the canon of Scripture, in an appendix to the Vulgate. The liturgy has never confined itself to quoting Scripture. The Gloria, the Te Deum and the Roman Canon are not Scripture either. What a liturgical text has to be is true, and prayed.
The older rite strips the Mass of everything festive. The 1962 Missal’s own rubrics, in the section headed De iis quæ omittuntur in Missis defunctorum, are blunt about it: the psalm Judica me is not said, the Gloria Patri is not said, the Gloria in excelsis is not said, nor the Alleluia, nor the Creed. The kiss of peace is not given. At the Agnus Dei the priest does not ask mercy on us but says dona eis requiem, give them rest, and the third time dona eis requiem sempiternam, give them rest everlasting. There is no blessing at the end. In place of Ite, missa est the priest says Requiescant in pace.
The effect is not morbidity but concentration. Strip out everything that celebrates and everything that concludes, and what is left is petition. The Requiem does not announce where the man is; it asks that he be brought where we want him to be.
One correction to a claim that traditionalists sometimes make, including in an earlier draft of this article. The line most often quoted to show that the modern funeral recovered Christian hope, life is changed, not ended, does sit in the Preface of the old Requiem: Tuis enim fidélibus, Dómine, vita mutátur, non tóllitur. For Thy faithful, O Lord, life is changed, not taken away. But it is not medieval. That Preface was inserted into the Roman Missal only in 1919, under Benedict XV; the text itself is older and its provenance is disputed, and before 1919 a Roman Requiem used the Common Preface. The narrower point survives: hope in the funeral liturgy is not a product of the Second Vatican Council. Catholics were hearing that sentence at Requiems between the wars, in black vestments, right before the Dies Irae.
It was never meant to happen only once
The Missal does not contain one Requiem. It contains a schedule.
There is a Mass for the day of death or burial. There are Masses for the third, seventh and thirtieth day after death. There is a Mass for the anniversary, to be offered every year, with no stated end. And there is a category called simply the Daily Mass for the Dead, for any other day it might be wanted, with its own proper Collects for a deceased man, a deceased woman, a priest, and for brethren, kindred and benefactors. A book does not develop that structure for something that happens once. The tiers exist because the Church expected the Mass to be applied again and again, on named days, for a named person.
The instinct is older than the Missal. Around the year 211 Tertullian describes Christians making offerings for the dead on the yearly anniversary, oblationes pro defunctis, pro nataliciis, annua die facimus, and elsewhere describes a widow who offers on the anniversary of her husband’s falling asleep. When St. Monica was dying she asked her son to remember her at the altar of the Lord. Recurrence was in the practice from very near the beginning.
The English vocabulary preserves the schedule even where the schedule has gone. The month’s mind was the Mass on the thirtieth day. The year’s mind was the anniversary. The bede roll was the parish list of its own dead, read aloud so that nobody fell off the end of the parish memory.
Layered on top were customs that assumed still more. Gregorian Masses are thirty Masses on thirty consecutive days for one soul, a practice traced to St. Gregory the Great, who had thirty offered for a monk of his own monastery named Justus. Families with money endowed anniversary Masses in perpetuity, and the Church took those obligations seriously enough that the 1917 Code reserved the reduction of founded Masses to the Holy See alone, even when a foundation’s income had failed.
In pre-Reformation England this reached an extraordinary scale through the chantry, an endowment paying a priest whose whole duty was to offer Mass for a named soul, often at a side altar, often in perpetuity. When Edward VI’s parliament suppressed them in December 1547, the commissioners’ returns recorded 2,374 chantries and guild chapels, along with 90 colleges and 110 hospitals, and historians think the count low. Two things were true at once. The Crown wanted the endowments for its wars. But the statute also said what the institutions were guilty of, namely maintaining vain Opinions of Purgatory and Masses satisfactory, to be done for them which be departed. Only the second motive measures the practice. You do not write that preamble about a marginal devotion.
American practice before the Council was less grand and more constant. A parish typically had one sung Mass on a Sunday and low Masses for the rest, and the routine Requiem was a low Mass on a weekday morning. In Europe the great polyphonic settings were written for princes and emperors; the ordinary Catholic dead were not commemorated by Victoria or Mozart. They were commemorated at seven in the morning by a priest, a server and a few relatives, with the deceased named aloud, and named again the next year. Nobody counted any of this, so it rests on memory and on what the books provided for. But the books provided for a great deal.
Why they thinned out
The explanation usually offered is that the reform abolished the daily Requiem. It did nothing of the kind.
Masses for the Dead are still in the current books, and the Funeral Mass holds first place among them. A Mass may be offered on news of a death, at the final burial, and on the first anniversary, even on days that would otherwise crowd it out. Other Masses for the Dead, the ones the books still call “daily,” may be celebrated on weekdays in Ordinary Time, provided such Masses are actually applied for the dead. A priest who wanted to offer a Requiem for your father on most Thursdays of the year could do it, today, without asking anyone.
There is a discouraging note in the books, and it is usually quoted with its reason cut off. Twenty-five paragraphs earlier and a chapter away from that permission, the General Instruction tells the priest not to displace the weekday readings too often, because the Church wants a richer portion of God’s word set before the people, and adds: For the same reason he should choose Masses for the Dead in moderation, for every Mass is offered for both the living and the dead, and there is a commemoration of the dead in the Eucharistic Prayer. The stated concern is the lectionary rather than the dead, and the identical counsel governs Masses for various needs. That is not an argument against suffrages. But a priest scanning his own book meets a permission with a brake attached.
The larger cause is arithmetic.
The old system ran on private Masses. Priests in a rectory typically offered their own Mass daily, often at a side altar, each with its own intention. That is one reason the churches of that era have side altars at all. A parish that had two or three priests offered two or three applied Masses every morning; a parish with one priest offers one Mass carrying one intention. Nationally the number of priests in the United States fell from 59,192 in 1970 to 34,092 in 2023, with religious-order priests falling furthest, while the Catholic population grew by roughly twenty million. Active diocesan priests per parish went from about 1.8 to under 1.0. That is a halving of capacity against a congregation half again as large. It is not the ten-to-one collapse the argument is sometimes given, and it does not need to be: each remaining Mass still carries one name rather than four.
Then the endowments went. St. Odilo’s commemoration of all the faithful departed at Cluny, established sometime in the first third of the eleventh century, and the medieval chantry after it, existed precisely because private memory fails. They were institutions for remembering the dead after the people who loved them had themselves died. Nothing replaced them, and an anniversary Mass now depends on a family remembering, every year, to walk into a parish office. Grief does not last long as an annual administrative task.
Nobody keeps a register of anniversary Masses, so no one can say by how much the practice has fallen; the number of Catholic funerals in the United States has in fact stayed roughly flat, a little over four hundred thousand a year across the whole period. What can be shown is the capacity, the disappearance of the endowment, and a vocabulary that has outlived the thing it named. Beyond that, this is judgment and testimony rather than measurement.
The presumption of heaven
The deepest cause is none of the above. It is that we stopped thinking there was anything left to ask for.
The careless version of this charge is false. Catholics have not forgotten that purgatory exists. Ask them directly and most can tell you roughly what the Church teaches. The doctrine has not been contradicted or repealed or even much attacked. It has been made unnecessary in practice by a habit of speech.
The sentence itself is not even false. A soul in purgatory is in a better place, being saved, certain, and past the possibility of loss. What is false is the full stop after it, the suggestion that the story is finished, the account closed, the living dismissed. He is in a better place is true. He is in a better place, so there is nothing more to do is what emptied the anniversary Masses.
The Church’s own instinct runs the other way, to an extraordinary caution. She investigates for decades, requires miracles, and until 1983 appointed an officer whose formal job was to argue against the cause. Even now, with canonizations at a historical high, she names a few hundred out of the billions who have died. The Church will not say after fifty years of process what a well-meaning cousin says at a lectern in four minutes.
The reformed rite does not teach this, and it forbids the vehicle. The Order of Christian Funerals directs that a brief homily on the readings is always given after the Gospel, “but there is never to be a eulogy.” The revised books still pray for the deceased, still provide Masses for the Dead, and still permit black vestments. The presumption grew up beside the rite and against its own instruction: in the words of remembrance, the printed programme, and the sentence people reach for in the parking lot.
Traditional readers will want more said here, and they have a point. The reform did substantially recast the prayers for the dead, dropped the Dies Irae from the funeral Mass in 1969, and moved the register of the whole rite from petition toward proclamation. That is a real change and fair to argue about. It is also a different charge from teaching people to presume, and the two get run together constantly.
The cost of the presumption lands on the mourners. Tell a grieving daughter that her father is certainly in heaven and you have taken from her the one thing she can still do for him. She wants to act; everyone in that condition wants to act. What she is offered instead is the suggestion that there is nothing to be done, dressed as consolation. The old practice took her grief and gave it work, on the third day, the seventh, the thirtieth, and every year afterward. It did not tell her to stop missing him. It told her that missing him could be useful to him.
The objection worth answering
There is a serious case against all this.
The medieval system of Masses for the dead bred real abuse. Obligations went unfulfilled, priests were maintained for no other purpose, and the whole apparatus acquired the smell of a transaction between money and mercy. This is not a Protestant slander; the Church legislated against it. Trent’s decree on purgatory, in Session XXV, taught that the souls detained there are helped by the suffrages of the faithful and above all by the sacrifice of the altar, and in the same decree ordered bishops to see that what is owed from the endowments of testators be discharged, not in a perfunctory manner, and to prohibit whatever savours of filthy lucre. Three sessions earlier, the decree on things to be observed and avoided in the celebration of Mass had already legislated in detail against avarice at the altar. The Church defended the doctrine and prosecuted the racket.
Canon law still does. A Mass offering is not a price, and the law works to keep it from becoming one: one intention per Mass and one offering, no accumulating of stipends, and trafficking in Mass offerings treated as a grave offence. Anyone reviving this practice should be able to say all of that out loud without flinching, because the moment a Requiem is spoken of as a purchase, the objection becomes correct.
The second objection is the one the modern rubric makes: every Mass already prays for the dead in the Canon, so your father is included. True, and he is. But the Church has never treated the general commemoration and the applied intention as the same act, and she protects the difference in her own law by requiring one Mass, one intention, one offering. A father who prays each night for all children everywhere has prayed for his son. He has not yet done for his son the particular thing he does when he says his name.
Bringing it back
A revival that consists of black vestments and the Dies Irae as an aesthetic is a costume. The vestments matter, but the act of asking is the thing, and the place to start is not the funeral but the anniversary.
Four practices, in order of how easily they can be recovered:
- Have the anniversary Mass offered, every year, by name. This needs no permission, no argument and no change of parish. It costs a phone call to a parish office and the customary offering. Do it for your parents on the day they died, and keep doing it long after everyone else has stopped mentioning them.
- Recover the month’s mind. The Mass on the thirtieth day is still in the books, and the thirtieth day is exactly when the casseroles have stopped arriving and the phone has gone quiet. Of all the lost customs, this is the one that most obviously answers to something real.
- Consider Gregorian Masses. Thirty Masses on thirty consecutive days for one soul. Several communities still arrange them, and for a parent or a spouse it is a serious and traditional thing to do.
- Ask your parish for a book of the dead. A physical register of the parish’s own departed, kept at the church, read in November, with Masses actually offered from it. This is the bede roll, and it rebuilds at parish scale the memory that the endowments used to carry and that nothing has replaced.
And keep November as the Church intends it. All Souls on 2 November is the day the whole Latin Church does at once what the Requiem does one soul at a time, and the grant attached to it is the most pointed in the whole book of indulgences. From 1 to 8 November, anyone who visits a cemetery and prays for the dead may gain a plenary indulgence which is applicable only to the souls in purgatory and never to himself. On any other day of the year the same visit gains a partial one. The Church is not being sentimental about graveyards. She is saying there is work to be done there, and that it is not work you can do for yourself.
None of this requires a liturgical argument. A Requiem can be offered in either form of the Roman Rite, and a Mass applied for your father in the ordinary form on a Tuesday morning is a Mass applied for your father. What has to be recovered is not a rubric but the belief that the dead are still reachable, and that being reachable, they have some claim on us.
We will all be prayed for by whoever is left, or we will not be. That is the argument for starting now, with our own dead, while we still remember their names and their dates.
References
- Missale Romanum (1962), Ritus Servandus, De iis quæ omittuntur in Missis defunctorum (“Those things omitted in Masses for the Dead”, our translation) — the omission of the Judica me, the Gloria Patri, the Gloria in excelsis, the Alleluia and the Creed; dona eis requiem and dona eis requiem sempiternam at the Agnus Dei; the omission of the kiss of peace and of the blessing; and Requiescant in pace in place of Ite, missa est.
- Preface for the Dead, 1962 Missal: Tuis enim fidélibus, Dómine, vita mutátur, non tóllitur, et dissolúta terréstris hujus incolátus domo, ætérna in cælis habitátio comparátur. (Some editions print cœlis.) The Preface was inserted into the Roman Missal in 1919 under Benedict XV; before that a Roman Requiem used the Common Preface. The text is older than 1919 and its provenance is disputed.
- Requiem formularies of the 1962 Missal: the day of death or burial; the third, seventh and thirtieth day; the anniversary; and the Daily Masses for the Dead, with proper Collects, Secrets and Postcommunions for a deceased man, a deceased woman, a priest, and for brethren, kindred and benefactors. The propers head the Introit and Gradual “4 Esdras 2:34, 35” and the Communion “4 Esdras 2:35, 34”.
- General Instruction of the Roman Missal, nn. 380–381, on the Funeral Mass and on Masses for the Dead, including “daily” Masses for the Dead on weekdays in Ordinary Time “provided such Masses are actually applied for the dead”. The counsel to choose such Masses “in moderation” is at n. 355, where it follows the direction not to displace the Weekday Lectionary; the parallel counsel for Masses for Various Needs is at n. 369. On black vestments, n. 346, with the adaptation for the dioceses of the United States permitting violet, white or black at funerals.
- Order of Christian Funerals, n. 27: a brief homily based on the readings is always given after the Gospel, “but there is never to be a eulogy.”
- Tertullian, De Corona 3: Oblationes pro defunctis, pro nataliciis, annua die facimus; and De Monogamia 10, on the widow offering on the anniversary of her husband’s death. St. Augustine, Confessions IX, on St. Monica’s request to be remembered at the altar of the Lord.
- Council of Trent, Session XXV (1563), decree on purgatory: the souls detained there are helped by the suffrages of the faithful and above all by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar; the same decree directs bishops that what is due from the endowments of testators be discharged not in a perfunctory manner, and that whatever savours of filthy lucre be prohibited. Session XXII, Decretum de observandis et evitandis in celebratione Missae, legislates in detail against avarice in the celebration of Mass.
- 1983 Code of Canon Law, cc. 945–958, on Mass offerings: one intention per Mass, the prohibition on accumulating offerings, and the grave prohibition of trafficking in them. 1917 Code, cc. 1517 §2 and 1551, on the reduction of the burdens of pious foundations and the reservation of the reduction of founded Masses to the Apostolic See.
- St. Gregory the Great, Dialogues IV, on the thirty Masses offered for the monk Justus, the origin of the custom of Gregorian Masses. Sources differ on whether Gregory was still abbot of St. Andrew’s or already pope when he ordered them.
- St. Odilo of Cluny established the annual commemoration of all the faithful departed on 2 November for the monasteries of his congregation. The date is disputed: 998 is commonly given, but a number of scholars place it after 1030.
- The Chantries Act of 1547, following the act of 1545; the commissioners’ returns of 1548 recorded 2,374 chantries and guild chapels, 90 colleges and 110 hospitals, generally regarded as an undercount. The preamble names vain Opinions of Purgatory and Masses satisfactory, to be done for them which be departed. On the fiscal motive and the wider destruction, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992).
- Enchiridion Indulgentiarum (4th ed., 1999), Visitatio coemeterii: a plenary indulgence, applicable only to the souls in purgatory, for those who devoutly visit a cemetery and pray for the dead on each day from 1 to 8 November; partial on the other days of the year.
- Priest and funeral statistics: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), Georgetown University, Frequently Requested Church Statistics. Priests in the United States: 59,192 (1970) and 34,092 (2023), with religious-order priests declining most steeply; Catholic funerals have remained roughly flat over the same period.
The texts of the Requiem Mass Prayers and of Eternal Rest are on the site, as is the Prayer for the Holy Souls in Purgatory. For the doctrine underneath all of this, see Purgatory: The Biblical and Patristic Evidence and Praying for the Dead: An Ancient Christian Practice. On why the vestments are black, see Liturgical Colors and the Church Year.