Mass For The Dead
The practice of saying Christian masses to benefit the soul of a deceased person is attested as early as the 8th century. The most common form was the anniversarium or missa annualis, a mass said annually on the date of the person's death. People believed that more numerous masses increased their efficacy. At the Council of Attigny (765), about 40 abbots and bishops agreed to say masses and recite the psalter for the souls of deceased members of their 'confraternity'. Ninth-century France and England had records of numerous confraternity agreements between monasteries or greater churches, by which each would offer prayers for the dead members of the other's communities. Before the year 1000 in Italy, France and England, great churches extended the benefits of such associations to lay folk. Kings and great magnates asked that prayers for their souls be said in the monasteries they founded on their estates.
Read more about this topic: Chantry
Famous quotes containing the words mass for, mass and/or dead:
“May they rest in peace.
[Requiescant in pace.]”
—Missal, The. Order of Mass for the Dead.
The Missal is book of prayers and rites used to celebrate the Roman Catholic mass during the year.
“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)