Living with purpose

On the Via Veneto just north of the Piazza Barberini in Rome is a well-known church called Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappucini. To many tourists it is more popularly known as “the bone church.” While this Capuchin church has many notable artistic features, these are not what make the church famous. Nor does its stately Italianate façade make it particularly noteworthy in a city filled with architectural marvels. Instead, this church is famous because of its crypt, which contains a number of strangely decorated chapels.

In 1631, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, a Capuchin friar, ordered that the remains of hundreds of Capuchin friars be exhumed from their cemetery. The bones of these friars were arranged in the crypt to become arches and columns, aedicules and ornaments surrounding the altars in a macabre display of post-renaissance piety.

Today, the crypt or ossuary, contains the remains of some 4,000 friars who had died between the 16th to the 19th centuries. On a large plaque visitors read the “memento mori,” a remembrance of death, in three languages: “What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be.”

Situated at the heart of the Christian mystery is this reality of death and an acknowledgment of its certainty for all of us. German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper notes, however, that death is hidden away in polite bourgeois society. In our secular culture we find what he refers to as “the materialistic trivialization of death.” Death becomes a statistic, seen as the mere consequence of an act of violence, tragedy or sickness, and simply the end of personal existence.

In our Catholic tradition, death maintains an appropriate place on our liturgical calendars and celebrations. The beginning of the month of November illustrates this rather poignantly. On Nov. 1 and Nov. 2, we remember all who have died in faith.

On Nov. 1, All Saints Day, we celebrate everyone who has passed through the portal of death and who are rejoicing in the vision of God in Heaven. These are the saints – the citizens of the Heavenly Jerusalem, people of every vocation and state in life. Their deaths bear witness to the glory of the resurrection, a glory that Christ first revealed to his apostles when he rose victorious over death. It is a glory offered to each of us who are called to be saints in virtue of our baptism. Some of us are fortunate to have met someone declared to be a saint by the Church.

I have had the privilege of meeting two canonized saints, Saint John Paul II and Saint Teresa of Calcutta. Some among us knew Blessed Stanley Rother, our Oklahoma martyr. Saints are real people! Many of us know people who lived lives of unmistakable holiness, but who may never publicly be declared saints by the Church. 

The saints are all those who enjoy the vision of God in Heaven whether known or unknown to us on earth. Holy Mother Church obliges us to celebrate all of these on Nov. 1: All Saints Day.

On Nov. 2, All Souls Day, we commemorate our loved ones who have gone before us “marked with the sign faith.” We pray for them, and we entrust them to God’s mercy. This day summons us to remember in charity those from whom we have been separated by death. It affirms our belief that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, we must be spotless and pure. 

If that purification has not been completed in this life, it will happen after death before we can enter the presence of God; thus, the reality of purgatory comes to the Catholic mind. On this day, Nov. 2, we express our solidarity with those members of the Church suffering the final purification of purgatory as we affirm our common pilgrimage to the Kingdom of Heaven where the Church triumphant lives in everlasting glory.

On these two days, we acknowledge the mystery of death as the path to eternal life. It is important that our liturgy and piety commemorate these days appropriately, for as Benedict XVI reminded us, “Attitudes to dying determine attitudes to living. Death becomes key to the question: What really is man?” 

We celebrate the witness and glory of the saints in heaven, we assist the soon-to-be saints in purgatory by our prayers, and we reflect on our own call to become saints – the meaning and direction of our lives. “Am I living purposefully with an eye fixed on the glory that awaits us with Christ and the saints in heaven?” 

The bones of the Capuchins decorate the crypt chapel in Rome not merely as a warning about shortness of life, but as an affirmation about the beauty of a holy death and the glory that awaits us in the Heavenly Jerusalem.