ARCHDIOCESE OF PHILADELPHIA

From the days of our youth we have believed in and professed the Communion of Saints. Today it is not only an article of faith that we accept but also a concrete debt of solidarity—priestly solidarity with our brother priests—that we are fulfilling.

Today we express in a very special way the reality of our fraternity in the priesthood. You and I try to do this frequently, in different ways, throughout the year. We try to do this:

• in maintaining long and faithful friendships with fellow priests,
• in keeping up fraternal contacts,
• in offering friendly encouragement and support at any time of the day or night,
• in sharing the joys and sorrows and successes of our brother priests,
• in being kind and understanding, and non-judgmental, even in the case of needed fraternal correction, which Christ enjoins on us,
• in being a witness to God’s enduring mercy and forgiveness, even in the face of a brother’s sin and failure,
Or we try, just simply put, to treat brother priests as we would have them treat us.

Today you and I, dear brother priests, strive to express our priestly fraternity and solidarity at a very profound level of our priesthood. Through the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior and great High Priest, we keep alive the memory of our brothers who have died. We acknowledge their labors in the vineyard of the Lord and their contribution to the building up of the Church in our Archdiocese. Some of us remember their priestly ministry to ourselves and our families: confessors, counselors, supporters, friends. We recognize, as does the Book of Revelation that our brothers now rest from their labors. They are among the dead who died in the Lord and whose works accompany them. And now our priestly fraternity and solidarity have reached the highest degree of communion in God’s kingdom: with our brothers either in Purgatory or in Heaven.

Today, in memory of our brother priests and in the context of this Mass, we are invited by the word of God to spell out some of the deepest truths of our faith. In the Gospel according to Saint Mark we proclaim the Death and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus. We reflect on His death on Calvary and His rising from the tomb at Easter, and we see these events of His Paschal Mystery not only as His personal victory, but also as the triumph He has shared with us and our deceased brother priests: "Dying, you destroyed our death, and rising, you restored our life."

When we hear the words: "Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last," we think also of how the High Priest’s redeeming love embraced our brother priests, atoned for their sins and gave incomparable efficacy to the death of every priest—ever alter Christus called to follow Jesus and to be conformed to Him in the likeness of His Death and Resurrection.

Today our fellow priests of past generations convoke us here to pray for them and, in doing so, to renew the deepest expression of our faith. They remind us of our vocation to die to sin and to live for God in Christ Jesus: to be worthy of the vocation to which we are called. In the Eucharistic renewal of Christ’s Death and Resurrection, which we offer for them, we ourselves find the strength to live in integrity of life, as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ.

We praise God for all our brothers who have already attained eternal life through the mercy of God that was channeled to them through the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In recalling these brothers we renew our profession of faith "in the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting."

In this November celebration we pause to reaffirm our faith also in the exhilarating teaching of the Church on Purgatory. The doctrine of the Communion of Saints leads us into this reflection. We proclaim with all the conviction of our hearts the Church’s teaching on God’s mercy promised us, in every generation. We accept its application in the beautiful doctrine of Purgatory: that even after death in Christ God’s mercy is operative. The saving Blood of Christ can be applied to our souls in a final outburst of God’s mercy, which is the last opportunity for total purification offered by Christ and exercised also through the ministry of His Church.

In the Old Testament there was foreshadowed in the Book of Maccabees the application of atonement made through sacrifice so that the dead might be freed from sin. Today we see the consummation of this stupendous reality. Through prayer and Christ’s Sacrifice, final purification is brought about. God’s mercy triumphs through the ministry of the Church and through the collaboration of God’s people called to the prayer of faith and expiation.

Our brother priests and all the faithful departed ask for our remembrance because we are called to be ministers of mercy.

And in this ministry of mercy, we exercise our greatest act of priestly fraternity and solidarity and reach the culmination of our communion with our beloved brother priests. Amen.