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| The ones who most need to remember are the ones who benefitted most. |
Our nation’s annual array of federal holidays presents some that integrate easily into the life of the Church and the practice of the Faith. Clearly Christmas is the most Catholic of them, with the perduring Madonna and Child stamp from the U.S. Postal Service illustrating this reality. Thanksgiving acknowledges God and our obligation to render Him gratitude, an essential Catholic activity even if the once-a-year focus originated outside the Communion. Yes, Abraham Lincoln’s religious disposition is an interesting question, but for another day. After those two, the suitability of the other holidays becomes increasingly tangential, except for Memorial Day.
Originally known as Decoration Day, this is the holiday on which citizens would turn out to clean up and festoon the graves and monuments of the ones who had given their lives in the defense of our national integrity and freedom. Burial grounds and markers are not unique to Christianity, but the whole concept of a cemetery, a word synonymous with dormitory, is uniquely Christian. It is there that the mortal remains of the departed rest in peace, that is, sleep, in anticipation of the heavenly resurrection. To visit these resting ones and care for their resting place is a most Christian activity.
It was 1971 when the name Memorial Day was fixed to the last Monday in May, a name that emphasizes another Christian and Catholic activity, remembering these departed ones. The Church has a whole month dedicated to it – November – but she does not begrudge an added day for this specific group of people so worthy of remembering.
We as Catholics know what to do with these memories that we nurture and share. We allow them to lead to prayer for the forgiveness of their sins, the happy repose of their souls, and the consolation of the ones who love them. The same gratitude that we stir up for our own dear departed every November is kindled now in May, but directed toward those who gave so much to protect and defend what we enjoy and treasure. The best thanks we can give them is to offer for them what we now have that they now need: intercessory prayer.
Remembering and its opposite, forced forgetting, have been recurring themes for me this year. After a period in our nation when monuments have been defaced or destroyed rather than decorated, and on my own undergraduate campus portraits and dedications removed and statues hidden, I have more than once confronted empty space where once there was an evocation of a person to be remembered. This erases not only the memorial of the ones depicted, but also of the people who held their memories at such great value as to be worthy of the effort and expense of memorialization. Generations are elided into oblivion.
Much as I regret it, I wish this destruction were limited to the hurly burly of our civic and secular culture, but it prowls in the life of the Church as well, where we should know better the obligations of memory and the grave disservice of forgetting.
To remember the good that anyone has done, whether it benefit us personally, our families, or our nation, is to incarnate the very remembering we both desire and expect of our just and merciful God (cf. Rev. 14:13). To allow our grateful memories to be added to the divine memory is to lend our mortal lives to the divine work of the Redeemer, making a sacrifice of propitiation unto the forgiveness of sins. (cf. 2 Maccabees 12: 43-46) While the opportunity to imitate our heavenly Father and share in His merciful forgiveness should be positive motivation enough, we also know and should dread the consequences of refusal. (Matthew 6: 15)
It would be vain foolishness to suggest that the ones we remember in gratitude on Memorial Day had no sins or lived their whole lives in ways worthy of emulation. But it is yet more vain to think that we are able to assess the value of their lives, and even more foolish to withhold memory and gratitude according to our own criteria. The yoke of grateful memory is easy, the burden of charity is light.
This civic holiday catches us Catholics at our best. Not only are we culturally and practically experts at feasting, but more specifically we bring our grateful memories to the Eucharistic feast that obtains for the ones we remember what we desire and hope for ourselves. Remember this, and do not forget.
Monsignor Smith
