We end October with what used to be a very Catholic exercise, Halloween and all that surrounds it; we turn our consideration to two sections of the Church that are not immediately visible to us.

One of those sections is the Church triumphant — the saints in heaven who make up a part of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church. The other section is the Church suffering — those souls who, for the expiation of the temporal punishment due to sin, have to spend some time in purgatory. This time is more commonly known as All Saints and All Souls Days.

Since the beginning of the 17th century, the Church has had a process which we call canonization. This is the process by which the lives of people proposed for sainthood are examined and a certain number of criteria are applied to determine whether they meet the standards required to be elevated to the honors of the altar.

But a short definition of a saint is a person who practices the theological virtues of faith, hope and love in a heroic fashion. The easiest examples of that to point to, of course, are the martyrs who gave their lives rather than give up their faith in the Lord Jesus and in his resurrection and in the teachings of the Church. The lives of the martyrs are always worth studying because they teach us that people were willing to give the ultimate sacrifice in order to profess publicly their faith in God.

On All Saints Day we honor all those people who have, so to speak, been let in by St. Peter and now see God face to face. We ask them to pray for us. It is the teaching of our Church that the prayers of the saints who have pleased God throughout the ages, are fruitful when they are made before God for us and for our intentions.

It has always been said in derision of the Catholic faith that Catholics pray to saints. We, of course, have never done that. However, we do acknowledge that the saints manifested the heavenly virtues of faith, hope and charity. Saints are powerful intercessors in the vision of God. When we ask them to pray for us it can be of great consolation that our cause is in the hands of the saints that we love and that they bear our intentions to God for His consideration.

Likewise, the souls in purgatory should be the object of our prayers as they are on All Souls Day. It is said, not entirely in jest, that if we make it to purgatory that is doing pretty well in the Catholic life. If you are not admitted to the presence of God immediately after death, you certainly will be before too long. Meanwhile, we can pray for all those who have died and for their release from purgatory and in turn they can pray to God for us even if their prayers cannot, because of the nature of things, profit themselves.

In a sense it is good to come to the end of the liturgical year by considering those members of the Church suffering and the Church triumphant who together with us, the Church militant, make up the mystical body of Christ. It should be important to realize that we are all in it together and that those powerful sections of the Church which have gone before us with the sign of faith can pray to God for the things that we want and need so that we can follow them home to our Almighty God and Father.