by Dan Masterton
When I think of the word “anniversary,” images of weddings readily pop into my mind -- pictures of the kiss at the end of the Mass, big smiles from the reception, beautiful memories from a honeymoon. Anniversaries are culturally associated almost exclusively, or at least primarily, with the commemoration of a wedding. During my year living in Ireland, however, the invocation of an anniversary was more likely related to death.
For reasons that exceed my limited knowledge of my Irish heritage,
1 the Irish are profoundly comfortable being intimate with death. While I feel like Americans, for the most part, often have a steady desire to keep death at arm’s length and only confront or consider it when utterly necessary and at hand, the Irish do not hide from the reality of death. During my volunteer year of ministry and catechesis in Ireland, our first opportunity to participate was singing with our parish folk group at a fundraiser and awareness event for suicide prevention, an opening glimpse that showed the cultural consciousness of death, in this case seeking to confront a growing epidemic in Irish society.
On a wider scale, death is something talked about with what felt to me like a very casual quality. Whether conversing in the parish office or sipping a mid-morning tea with friends, there was almost an inevitability that death would somehow come up. It was rarely a moment to mope or vent; rather, it was a not quite detached but certainly not overly emotional reference to a friend, family member, or neighbor who had passed away. Something in a story or memory would call to mind a dearly departed person, and the Irish assembled there would play the remembering game, piecing together the pertinent details that small-town folks carefully track -- spouse’s name, names of children, address or general whereabouts, and years since their passing. The whole discussion was somewhere between good-natured gossip and clinical record-keeping. It felt foreign to me, but on the whole, it demonstrated the love and care for neighbor that is a hallmark of the Irish people.
In terms of piety, the Irish fervently practice Mass dedications. Like many of my friends and family here, my Irish friends were keen to visit the parish office and make a donation to celebrate Mass in the name of someone who had passed away. This instinct among the local faithful was so strong that my parish had to discontinue the practice of each Mass being celebrated for one particular person. The quantity of requests for prayers and the desire for Masses to focus on one specific person became too much, so the parish had to expand the books to allow for multiple dedications per day. This process reflects the earnest pastoral care of the Irish people, who so steadily check in on one another and live out mutual support.
And this is where the Irish piety is so strong. Masses weren’t just requested for those who had passed recently. People made donations in the name of those who had passed away one month ago, a practice known in Irish parlance as the “month’s mind.” People came in to request Masses for others on their anniversaries -- not to commemorate a wedding but as a nod to the date of that person’s
death many years ago. And so the parish came to celebrate multiple people and their lives at each Mass, with ever popular prayerful sentiment from the faithful to memorialize their loved ones.
The most powerful encapsulation of this piety came in November.
When people would ask me about the Church in Ireland, I’d describe the general scene using the pervasive problem of “Sacrament hopping” -- people come to the Church for marriage, disappear until they baptize their babies, disappear again until First Communion, disappear once again until Confirmation (at age twelve mind you), and finally reappear when they want to get married and then start the cycle over again; this is a problem that the wider Church continues to face, but in a country where Catholicism is culturally entrenched, the issue of the Church only being involved at milestone moments felt more dangerous.
2
The nuanced layer beyond this generalization was the Irish turned out in strong numbers for sacramentals -- celebrations accompanied by a visible sign of those invisible realities. While some might respond that each Eucharist and Mass involves sacramentals, I’m talking here about Church celebrations that come with a different sacramental. The local people particularly flooded our Church in disproportionately high numbers for ashes on Ash Wednesday, for take-home shamrocks on the feast of St. Patrick, and for the rituals of remembrance on All Souls Day.
Each year, around the November 2 feast of All Souls, a special parish Mass included a reading of every late parishioner’s name, one-by-one, in chronological order from last November all the way up to that week. As each person’s name was read, someone would bring a photo forward of that person to display for a parish remembrance and All Souls Day prayer. The staff and community worked together to ensure that each person had someone ready with a picture so that no person would go un-memorialized. And so, over what was likely a long period of time that passed like kairos with intentionality, the litany of the dead was read, and the procession of the faithful moved in parallel with it as the community carefully remembered each of its late members. The dimly candle-lit church, the body language of those who came forward, the mismatched collection of photos, the packed-to-the-walls congregation -- all of it was an imperfect parish, comprised of inconsistent yet faithful members, making a beautiful prayer to God for their loved ones.
The Church in America, while flawed, struggling, and evolving, has a lot going for it -- robust and growing professional ministry, a substantial place for the laity, an active role in education at all levels, and more. But a fading facet of our identity is piety. We’re not as intimate with the Rosary; we don’t as often utilize the Liturgy of the Hours or novena prayers; we struggle to incorporate Adoration into our worship. The Irish, though facing issues of generational transition and transmission of faith, retain these beautiful pieties with zeal, shown beautifully here by their commemoration of All Souls.
This never meant more to me than when, eight months after leaving Ireland following my volunteer year, my mom passed away at the age of 60. And as word traveled across the pond to the priests and parishioners who had been such close companions, our dear parish priest wrote to me. He said that they had rung the great bell from the parish tower in prayer for my mom that night, and in the way that only the Irish can, he put her forth in memorial at Mass the next morning.
3
Love you, mom.
1 I’m a first-generation American. My dad was born in Ireland, and I can claim dual citizenship and an Irish EU passport, a privilege my older brother utilized. Pretty neat and a big point of pride for my brothers and me.↩
2 Sacraments start to feel like birthday parties or social gatherings when the religious and spiritual elements become so shallowly rooted. The content of the Mass and Sacrament seemed to become thoroughly second fiddle to the showy outfits, photo opportunities, and ostentatious social events that followed Mass. Again, not a uniquely Irish problem, but one that felt different in a country where Catholic is synonymous with one’s nationality, different than the Protestant/pluralistic American norms.↩
3 My mom had visited me in Ireland with my dad and older brother for a week during my volunteer year. We spent a few days in Ireland, but what was extra-special was the three-day trip we took to sneak away to Poland. I had been the first descendant on her Polish side of the family to return to the Polish soil a few years prior, and so together, we visited Krakow and Auschwitz. She passed away less than a year later. After my mom's memorial Mass and internment, one of her best friends told me something I already knew but cherished anyway -- that mom LOVED that special trip.↩
