On November 2 the Church keeps the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed — All Souls' Day — the day of prayer for all who have died and are still being purified in purgatory, on their way to the vision of God. The commemoration follows All Saints' Day: on November 1 the Church celebrates the saints already in glory, on November 2 she prays for those still on the way. The two feasts are a single liturgical arc.
The feast was fixed on November 2 by St. Odilo, Abbot of Cluny, around 998 — he ordered that every monastery of the Cluniac congregation should, on November 2, sing the Office of the Dead for all the faithful departed. The custom spread from Cluny through the monastic and diocesan churches of Europe until, by the 14th century, November 2 was universally observed. The dead, Odilo held, should not be neglected; the living owe them prayer, and the prayer of the living can help the dead.
All Souls' Day is kept in every Catholic cemetery in the world. In many cultures it is the day of family pilgrimage to the graves of ancestors — in Poland, in the Philippines, in Mexico (where it merges with the Day of the Dead, Día de los Muertos), in Italy and France. Pilgrims visiting Rome on this day may attend the papal Mass at the Vatican for the dead of the past year, and the Catacombs of Callixtus and Priscilla on the Appian Way — the earliest cemeteries of Christian Rome — carry the feast's weight with particular force. The readings of the day are from Job, Lamentations, and the Book of Wisdom; the Dies Irae is sung in the old rite.
