Mass for the Dead

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Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine — “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.” The petition opens the rite and gives it its name. The Mass for the dead is the form of the Catholic Mass offered not for the living gathered at the altar but for the souls of those who have died, and from its first word it is commonly called the Requiem. The whole rite takes its character from that opening clause: where the Sunday Mass is thanksgiving and celebration, this is intercession, the assembly speaking on behalf of someone who can no longer speak. Its texts are the same in structure as any Mass — an entrance chant, the Kyrie, readings, the offering, the great thanksgiving over bread and wine, communion — but every variable part has been turned toward a single end, and certain joyful parts are stripped away.

The shape of the rite

The Requiem is built from the ordinary order of the Mass with its proper texts exchanged and a small set of its festive elements removed. The Gloria, the great hymn of praise, is dropped; so is the Credo and, in the older form, the Alleluia, which is too plainly a song of rejoicing. In their place the entrance antiphon is the Requiem aeternam, whose phrasing the Roman tradition drew from an apocryphal verse — the Fourth Book of Esdras — promising rest to the people of God. Through the whole rite the doxology Gloria Patri is suppressed and the words Requiem aeternam take its place wherever it would fall, so that the prayer for rest sounds again and again like a refrain. After the gradual comes the tract, Absolve, Domine, asking that the dead be loosed from the bonds of their sins; then, for seven centuries, the sequence Dies Irae. The offertory, Domine Jesu Christe, begs deliverance from the pains of hell and the deep pit; the communion antiphon, Lux aeterna, returns once more to light and rest. At the older funeral, after the Mass proper, came the absolution at the catafalque, with the responsory Libera me, Domine — “Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death on that fearful day” — and the body was carried to the grave with the antiphon In Paradisum, which asks the angels to lead the soul into paradise. The vestments are black, or in some uses violet; the rite is austere by design, shorn of the ornament that a feast would carry.

The Requiem is not one occasion but a family of them. It is sung at a funeral, over the body before burial; on the day of burial itself; on the third, seventh, and thirtieth days after a death, and on its yearly anniversary; and on the second of November, All Souls’ Day, when the whole Church commemorates the faithful departed at once. Beyond the Mass proper, the dead are also held in the Office of the Dead, the cycle of psalms, readings, and canticles — Vespers, Matins, Lauds — recited for them within the Liturgy of the Hours; its evening hour parallels the daily Vespers of the living. Mass and Office together make the liturgical apparatus by which the medieval and modern Church kept the dead present among the living, named and prayed for by name.

The doctrine the rite assumes

The Requiem does not argue a case; it acts on one. Behind it stands the teaching that the souls of most of the faithful, neither damned to hell nor yet pure enough for the unmediated vision of God, pass through a state of purification — purgatory — before they are fit to enter heaven. Those in that state are already saved; what remains is a cleansing of what would otherwise keep them from God’s presence. And — this is the hinge on which the whole rite turns — the living can help them. By prayer, by alms, by good works, and above all by the offering of the Mass, the faithful on earth can ease and shorten that passage, applying to the dead the fruit of Christ’s sacrifice made present at the altar. This rests on the broader conviction of a single communion binding the Church on earth, the souls being purified, and the saints in glory — one body in which merit can be shared across the boundary of death. The Requiem is the sharpest liturgical expression of that conviction: an action done by the living, for the dead, that the doctrine holds to be genuinely effective on their behalf.

That premise is old in practice and slower in definition. The custom of praying and offering for the dead reaches back into the early centuries, attested at the tombs of the martyrs and in the names read at the altar; a verse in the Second Book of Maccabees, where sacrifice is made for the slain, was read as warrant for it. The doctrine of purgatory hardened around this practice over the medieval centuries and was defined at the councils of Lyon (1274), Florence (1439), and Trent. From the same root grew the dense late-medieval economy of suffrages for the dead — endowed anniversary Masses, chantries founded so that a priest would say the Requiem in perpetuity for a named soul, and the indulgences that promised remission of the temporal punishment still owed. By the end of the Middle Ages the Mass for the dead was among the most-celebrated of all liturgical acts, and a great share of the Church’s wealth and labor was bound up in saying it.

The Reformation breach

The Reformers struck at the root rather than the branch. If there is no purgatory — and they held that Scripture nowhere teaches it — then there is no intermediate state for the prayers of the living to reach, and no transferable merit to send. If Christ’s death alone is sufficient and is received by faith, then no further offering can be made for anyone, living or dead, and the very notion of the Mass as a sacrifice repeated for the benefit of souls was, to them, an error. Martin Luther, whose protest of 1517 began over the sale of indulgences tied to exactly this economy, came to reject the whole structure; the more radical Reformers went further still. With the doctrine gone, the rite had nothing to do. The Protestant churches abandoned the Mass for the dead altogether: funerals became services of Scripture, sermon, and the burial of the body in hope of resurrection, with no offering made for the soul and no prayer that presumed to alter its state. The Catholic Church, at the Council of Trent, reaffirmed both purgatory and the propriety of the Requiem against them. The two settlements have stood, side by side, ever since — one holding that the dead are reachable and the Mass effective for them, the other that they are in God’s hands alone and beyond the help of any earthly rite.

The Day of Wrath

For most of its history the most arresting moment of the Requiem was the sequence Dies Irae — “Day of Wrath” — a rhymed Latin poem of the thirteenth century, traditionally ascribed to the Franciscan Thomas of Celano, on the Last Judgment. It renders the end of the world as a single scene: the trumpet sounding across the graves, the books opened in which every hidden thing is written, the soul standing before the throne and pleading to be numbered among the saved. Its tone is dread before it is mercy, and its stark descending plainchant became, in time, Western music’s standing figure for death itself. The sequence sat oddly against the rite’s own prayers for rest and light, terror braided into a service of consolation, and that tension was felt sharply in the twentieth century. The reform of the liturgy that followed the Second Vatican Council — drafted by the body charged with implementing the council’s constitution on the liturgy, and associated with Annibale Bugnini — removed the Dies Irae from the Mass for the dead in the missal of 1970, on the reasoning that the funeral rite should express the paschal character of Christian death: emphasis was to fall on resurrection and hope rather than on judgment and fear. The reformers spoke of pruning texts that carried a negative spirituality inherited from the Middle Ages. The older form, with the Dies Irae intact, survives where the Tridentine Latin liturgy is still celebrated, and the sequence remains available elsewhere as an optional hymn. The same revision reframed the rite’s horizon toward the resurrection of the dead and the consolation that the earliest Christian writing on the dead had already offered — the assurance, in Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, that those who have died in Christ will rise and that the living should not grieve as those without hope.

Scholarship and the texts

The Requiem’s proper texts are gathered in the Roman Missal and its chants in the Graduale Romanum; the plainchant settings, including the Dies Irae melody, are collected in the Liber Usualis compiled by the monks of Solesmes. The standard older reference articles remain the entries on Requiem Masses and the Office of the Dead in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, which set out the structure, the omitted parts, and the origin of the Requiem aeternam antiphon in the Fourth Book of Esdras. The historian Jacques Le Goff traced the medieval crystallization of purgatory as a distinct “third place,” the doctrine the rite presupposes; Alec Robertson’s Requiem: Music of Mourning and Consolation surveys the rite’s long passage into the concert hall. The fortunes of the Dies Irae in particular, from liturgy to common musical token of mortality, are charted in the literature on the sequence and its reception in Western art music.

A second life in music

Because its texts are fixed and freighted with the largest of subjects, the Requiem became one of the great occasions of Western music. Composers set its Latin from the Renaissance onward, each reading the same words differently. The earliest surviving polyphonic setting is by Johannes Ockeghem in the later fifteenth century; Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Officium Defunctorum of 1605 is a high point of the Renaissance, austere and luminous. Mozart’s Requiem of 1791, left unfinished at his death and completed by his pupil Süssmayr, fused the liturgy with the drama of the symphony. The nineteenth century pressed the rite to vast scale: Berlioz’s Grande Messe des morts of 1837 set the Dies Irae for choir and multiple brass choirs answering across the building, and Verdi’s Requiem of 1874 carried the full force of operatic Italy into the church, its Dies Irae a recurring storm. Against that current, Fauré’s Requiem of the late century turned away from terror entirely — he left out the Dies Irae almost wholly, closed not on judgment but on In Paradisum, and conceived death as a gentle release rather than a reckoning. The line continued into the twentieth century, with Duruflé’s chant-rooted setting and Britten’s War Requiem of 1962, which laced the Latin of the Mass through the poems of a soldier killed in the First World War.

In this passage the Requiem came to lead a second life largely detached from the altar. The concert “Requiem” is performed for audiences who may share none of the doctrine the words assume, sung by choirs in halls rather than priests over coffins, the petition for the dead become a meditation on death as such. Some modern settings keep only the title and the mood and drop the liturgical text entirely. Whether the dead are in fact reachable by the prayers of the living is a claim the Church makes and the Reformed deny, and the rite itself does not contest the point but assumes it and proceeds to ask. What it stages, in either reading, is an old and persistent gesture: the community gathering to do something on behalf of those who can no longer act for themselves.

→ Related: Second Coming · First Epistle To The Thessalonians · Beatification · Purgatory · Catholic Mass · Tridentine Mass · Dies Irae · Liturgy · Liturgy Of The Hours · Vespers · Soul · Hell · Martin Luther