Purgatory, in either its classic or its modern form, provides the rationale for All Souls’ Day. This Day, now kept on 2 November, was a tenth-century Benedictine innovation. It clearly assumes a sharp distinction between the ‘saints’, who have already made it to heaven, and the ‘souls’, who haven’t, and who are therefore still, at least in theory, less than completely happy and need our help to move on from there. (In some countries All Saints and All Souls form a combined ‘days of the dead’. In Mexico they keep ‘Dias de los Muertos’, though close to the United States border people grumble
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