2 novembre 2016
Today: Nov. 2. The calendar reminds us that the Church commemorates the dead. And if it were not written on the calendar, the date is well etched in the hearts of each of us who, today, share with our neighbors as much grief over the passing of a loved one as the hope that they are still with us in some way.
Commemoration is linked to different traditions in different parts of the Catholic world. Yet the day commonly called "Day of the Dead" did not originate with the Catholic Church, but centuries later, in a specific spiritual context.
As was the case with other feasts in the Christian liturgy, the Church calendar "overlapped" with pagan rituals. Which were actually present in very ancient times, well before the vernacular era, to celebrate the feast of the ancestors-or the dead-on the very days that ferried October to early November in a period that fell right between late October and early November. Why?
The book of Genesis reports that on the "seventeenth day of the second month," according to the ancient Hebrew calendar (in ours, November) Noah began the construction of the ark. Thus, the origin of rituals related to the dead is lost in the mists of time, those swept away by the Great Flood. It is the remembrance of those who were swept away by it, as if to avert with apotropaic rites the recurrence of such a cataclysm.
In fact, further on in time, we find that civilizations distant in space and time have given rise, each in its own way, to rites and celebrations in honor of the souls of the dead. In honor, yes, but also in deference to the power of those to be benevolent toward the living. More fear and superstition, then, than piousness.
But to whom or to what does Christian commemoration directly appeal?
The Celtic tradition is the one that has stamped its mark most intensely and uniformly over a vast territory. In the Celtic calendar, the night of Samhain - dedicated to the souls of all the dead - fell between the days corresponding, today, to October 31 and November 1.
When, slowly but gradually, Christianity spread to pagan populations, it did not, however, succeed in severing all the ties those populations had and felt with their own traditions. The Church, so to speak, agreed to bend to a kind of compromise: including pagan holidays in its liturgy (including dates), but enriching them with Christian significance.
With this in mind, Pope Gregory II, in the year 835, moved the feast of All Saints' Day from May 13 to November 1, thinking. And more than a century and a half later, the abbot of Cluny, Odilo, linked that holiday to the commemoration of the dead, officially enshrined in the Christian calendar on November 2. As for the disappearance of rituals to exorcise the presence of the dead among the living, this is a battle that engages.
