Requiem æternam

A Requiem is a Mass offered for the repose of the soul of someone who has died. It takes its name from the first word of its opening chant: Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis — eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. Two petitions, rest and light, and the Mass returns to them from beginning to end.

Rest does not mean sleep. It carries the sense St. Augustine gave it in the first paragraph of the Confessions: fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te — Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee. His verb is requiescat, the same root. What the Church asks is not repose but arrival: an end to the restlessness, in God.

A Requiem is not a celebration of the life that was lived. It is something the Church believes will serve the dead better than praise — the offering of the Sacrifice of Calvary for the repose of a soul.

Because the Church has always believed that the dead can be helped by the prayers of the living, and that it is right to offer them. “It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins.” 2 Machabees 12:46

This is not a presumption about where anyone has gone. The Church does not announce the verdict of a judgment that belongs to God alone. She mourns, and she prays, and she asks the same of those who come — sorrowing, but as St. Paul puts it in the very Epistle sung at a Requiem, not “as others who have no hope.” 1 Thessalonians 4:12

That is also why a Requiem can be offered more than once, and years afterwards, and in a city the dead never lived in. It is not a service held to mark an occasion. It is an act done for someone.

Everything in the rite follows from what it is for. The vestments are black. The candles are unbleached. There is no Gloria and no Alleluia, and at the end there is no final blessing. The organ is silent except to hold up the voices.

The Church does not pretend that death is nothing. She does not decorate it, and she does not hurry past it.

Two Requiems have been offered for him, both according to the Roman Missal of 1962, and they are not the same rite twice.

In San Diego, on 3 September 2026, his body was present. The Mass was followed by the Rite of Burial, and he was interred that morning. The Ordinary and the Propers were sung in their full Gregorian form, without simplification.

In San Antonio, on 20 November 2026, he is already buried, so the Rite of Burial is not repeated — the prayers at the graveside belong to the grave, and were said over it. Where a body is absent the Church's own books provide for it rather than leaving the dead without the rite. The Mass is sung by an ensemble of ten voices, two to a part, in the setting of the Missa pro defunctis a 5 by Cristóbal de Morales, published at Rome in 1544 while its composer sang in the chapel of the Pope.

Anyone who wishes to pray for him is welcome to come. A Requiem at a parish church is not a private gathering.

Friday, the twentieth of November, two thousand and twenty-six
Half past seven in the evening

Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic Church
15415 Red Robin Road · San Antonio, Texas 78255
Celebrant: Rev. Fr. Armando Alejandro