Spirituality

A priest celebrates an All Souls' Day Mass at a parish cemetery in Smithtown, N.Y., in November 2017. CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz, Long Island Catholic

Friday, November 21, 2025Spirituality

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We typically use the word "suffrage" for the right to vote, as in "women's suffrage." But what does it mean in connection with prayers for the dead?

Michael
Pakaluk

The best and most effective thing a young Catholic man can do to express his manliness authentically is to attend daily Mass. Or so I will argue.
But my argument depends upon seeing the Mass as an assembly of warriors for battle -- a new image for some of us perhaps. And yet in November specifically, when the church teaches us again to pray for the dead, she also invites us to look at the Mass in this way.
Everything hinges on the church’s teaching that a Mass is a suffrage.
The late great Father John Hardon sets the stage for us, with an entry from his “Modern Catholic Dictionary”:
“SUFFRAGES. The prayers prescribed or promised for specific intentions. More particularly, suffrages are the Masses, prayers, or acts of piety offered for the repose of the souls of the faithful departed.”
We typically use the word “suffrage” for the right to vote, as in “women’s suffrage.” But what does it mean in connection with prayers for the dead?
Father Hardon’s language echoes that of the Council of Trent, which taught in its last session (1563) “that purgatory exists, and that the souls detained therein are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, but especially by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar.”
Trent, in turn, was only echoing the teaching of the Second Ecumenical Council of Florence (1439):

“(We define) likewise, that if the truly penitent die in the love of God, before they have made satisfaction by worthy fruits of penance for their sins of commission and omission, their souls are purified by purgatorial pains after death; and that for relief from these pains they are benefitted by the suffrages of the faithful in this life, “that is, by Masses, prayers, and almsgiving, and by the other offices of piety usually performed by the faithful for one another according to the practice (instituta) of the church.
And as if to demonstrate the constancy of church teaching, our most recent Catechism teaches: “From the beginning the church has honored the memory of the dead and offered prayers in suffrage for them, above all the Eucharistic sacrifice” (n. 1032).
There are those odd words again, “suffrage” and “suffrages.”
“From the beginning,” the church did indeed pray for the dead. The catacombs are filled with such inscriptions (“May God grant you eternal light!” “May he find refreshment!”) and asking for the prayers of visitors (“You who are reading this: pray for him!”).
The resultant doctrine of Purgatory is perhaps the clearest case of “lex orandi, lex credendi” -- that “norms of prayer imply norms of belief.” As the Reformers with mistaken purpose liked to emphasize, the church’s explicit teaching about Purgatory -- its teaching about the state of a penitent soul after death, which makes full sense for prayers for the dead -- took centuries to become definite, through the teachings of great saints such as St. Gregory, St. Augustine, and St. John Chrysostom.
The church’s newest Doctor, St. John Henry Newman, explained the consequent development as follows. The doctrine of Purgatory, he said, seemed not very important to articulate in the early centuries of the church, marked as they were by Roman persecution, because to be a Christian then meant to be prepared, with a definite commitment of will, to die for Christ if necessary. However, after Christianity became a public religion in the Roman Empire, and the church inevitably had to face the fact of mediocrity and continued sin among Christians after baptism, some definite doctrine needed to be articulated:
“Most men, to our apprehensions, are too little formed in religious habits either for heaven or hell; yet there is no middle state, when Christ comes in judgment. In consequence it was obvious to have recourse to the interval before His coming, as a time during which this incompleteness might be remedied; a season, not of changing the spiritual bent and character of the soul departed, whatever that be, for probation ends with mortal life, but of developing it into a more determinate form, whether of good or of evil.” (Development of Christian Doctrine)
But as the Councils teach, it is the prayer by a priest at the altar which most helps the souls in Purgatory, as in the First Eucharistic Prayer:
“Remember also, Lord, your servants who have gone before us with the sign of faith and rest in the sleep of peace. Grant them, O Lord, we pray, and all who sleep in Christ, a place of refreshment, light, and peace.”
In imperial Rome, a “suffragium” was a vote -- a voice vote primarily. The word could also mean, applause. So then, imagine that when the priest says the words just quoted, the faithful did not merely say softly “Amen,” but rather shouted it loudly, and applauded too, signifying thereby their hearty “vote” that the dead be assisted through the priest’s prayer. And now you are beginning to grasp the meaning of “suffrage.”
But more than this. “Suffragium” comes from the Latin word “fragor,” meaning “clash of weapons,” because the earliest assemblies were composed of warriors, who would signal their agreement to a leader’s proposal by striking their blades and armor against each other (see Jyri Vaahtera in “Glotta,” 1993).
And now you have a fuller and more correct picture of a “suffrage.” It is the sounding of weapons among warriors in the church militant, in support of their brothers and sisters in the church suffering.