The Requiem Mass Through History

The Requiem Mass is, technically, a votive Mass of the dead: a Mass whose proper texts are not those of the day but those the Church reserves for prayer for the dead. It is celebrated above all on the day of the funeral, but also on anniversaries of a death, at the month's mind and year's mind, and most particularly on the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, 2 November.^[5]

A Mass "for the dead"

The official name is Missa pro defunctis, "Mass for the dead". The common name of Requiem is a usage: we have taken the habit of naming the Mass by the first word of its entrance chant, just as we speak of the Gaudete or Lætare Mass for certain Sundays. Requiem is the accusative of the Latin requies, "rest": the Mass of the dead is therefore, literally, the Mass of the rest asked of God for those who have left this world.^[6]

This "rest" is not mere sleep: it is rest in God, the end of all combat and all purification, entry into the peace of the beatific vision. The Mass therefore does not merely weep for one who is absent; it asks something for him — light, rest, deliverance — because the Church believes these gifts can still be obtained for him.

What sets the Mass of the dead apart

To eye and ear, the Requiem Mass is immediately recognisable, for it strips itself of everything which, in the ordinary Mass, expresses festive joy:

• The priest wears black vestments (violet is permitted today) instead of white, green or red.
• The Gloria (hymn of joyful praise) and the Credo are omitted.
• The Alleluia is suppressed, replaced by a grave-toned Tract, then by the Dies iræ sequence.
• At the Agnus Dei, the usual supplication "grant us peace" becomes "grant them rest" (dona eis requiem).
• In the traditional form, certain blessings, the kiss of peace, and the psalm Iudica me at the beginning were omitted.^[7]

This sobriety is not sadness for sadness's sake: it expresses the gravity of a Church standing before death, judgment and the mercy of God, with none of the ornaments of feasting, yet without despair either — for the last word of the rite, as we shall see, is a word of light.

The Requiem Mass can only be understood on a very precise foundation of faith: the Church believes that praying for the dead has meaning and efficacy. Without this conviction, the Mass of the dead would be a mere tribute; with it, it becomes an act of charity that truly reaches the departed. The doctrine of purgatory and the practice of suffrages are treated in their own right elsewhere — only what sheds light on the Mass itself is given here.^[8]

The witness of Scripture and the Fathers

The root is biblical. In the second book of Maccabees, Judas Maccabeus has a sacrifice offered for the fallen soldiers:

"It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins." — 2 Maccabees 12:46^[9]

The Fathers carry this gesture forward. St John Chrysostom urges us not to hesitate to aid the departed:

"Let us help them and commemorate them. […] Let us not hesitate to help those who have departed and to offer our prayers for them." — St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, 41^[10]

And St Augustine records the last wish of his mother, St Monica, which alone sums up the spirit of every Requiem Mass:

"Bury this body anywhere! […] All I ask of you is that you remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you may be." — St Monica, as reported by St Augustine, Confessions, IX, 11^[11]

Purgatory and suffrages

This practice presupposes an intermediate state: souls that are saved but not yet fully purified, whom we can help. This is the doctrine of purgatory, which the Council of Trent reaffirmed against the Protestant Reformation:

"There is a purgatory, and […] the souls detained there are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, and chiefly by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar." — Council of Trent, decree on purgatory, 3 December 1563^[12]

The Catechism of the Catholic Church takes up this tradition and names, among all suffrages, the first of them all:

"From the beginning the Church has honored the memory of the dead and offered prayers in suffrage for them, above all the Eucharistic sacrifice, so that, thus purified, they may attain the beatific vision of God." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1032^[13]

The Mass, a sacrifice offered for the departed

That is why the Mass holds a unique place: it is not only a prayer about the dead, it is the sacrifice of Christ Himself offered for them. The Council of Trent defined this solemnly against those who denied it: the Eucharistic sacrifice is offered not only for the living, but also "for the dead in Christ, not yet fully purified".^[14] The Catechism repeats it simply:

"The Eucharistic sacrifice is also offered for the faithful departed who 'have died in Christ but are not yet wholly purified,' so that they may be able to enter into the light and peace of Christ." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1371^[15]

The Requiem Mass is therefore the highest application of this truth: the Church bears the departed within the very offering of the Son.

The heart of the Requiem Mass is its proper texts: a remarkably fixed body, almost identical from one century to the next, which explains why so many composers were able to set exactly the same words to music. To go through them is to follow a complete spiritual itinerary: from supplication for rest to the light of paradise.

The Introit: Requiem æternam

The Mass opens with the antiphon that gave it its name, woven from Scripture (Esdras and Psalm 64):

"Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. A hymn becometh Thee, O God, in Sion; a vow shall be paid to Thee in Jerusalem. Hear my prayer: all flesh shall come to Thee." — Introit Requiem æternam^[16]

Two words will return like a refrain throughout the Mass: requiem (rest) and lux (light). The whole liturgy of the dead rests upon this pair.

The Kyrie

As at every Mass, the Kyrie eleison ("Lord, have mercy") follows the Introit. But deprived of the Gloria that would ordinarily follow it, it takes on here a colour of pure supplication.

The Gradual and the Tract

In place of the joyful Alleluia, the Mass of the dead sings a Gradual (which takes up Requiem æternam and the verse "The just shall be in everlasting remembrance") and then a Tract, the Absolve, Domine:

"Absolve, O Lord, the souls of all the faithful departed from every bond of sin; and by Thy gracious help may they deserve to escape the judgment of vengeance and to enjoy the blessedness of eternal light." — Tract Absolve, Domine^[17]

The Dies iræ sequence

Then comes the most famous piece in the whole Mass: the long Dies iræ sequence ("Day of wrath"), a striking meditation on the Last Judgment, traditionally attributed to the Franciscan Thomas of Celano (c. 1200–1265) and admitted into the Roman Missal in the 16th century.^[18] Its own history, text and musical posterity are the subject of a separate dossier: see The Dies Irae. What matters here is that it gave the Requiem Mass its dramatic tone — the one Mozart and Verdi would exploit with unheard-of power — and that it would be precisely the object of the 20th-century reform.

The Offertory: Domine Jesu Christe

At the Offertory, the Church begs Christ the King of glory to deliver souls:

"O Lord Jesus Christ, King of glory, deliver the souls of all the faithful departed from the pains of hell and from the deep pit. Deliver them from the lion's mouth, that hell may not swallow them up, that they may not fall into darkness; but let Michael, the holy standard-bearer, bring them into the holy light which Thou didst promise of old to Abraham and his seed." — Offertory Domine Jesu Christe^[19]

It is one of the most image-laden texts in the whole liturgy: the lion, the abyss, the archangel standard-bearer, the light promised to Abraham. Music would seize upon it.

The Sanctus and the Agnus Dei

The Sanctus is that of every Mass. But at the Agnus Dei, the formula changes: instead of "have mercy on us" and "grant us peace", the Church sings twice "grant them rest" (dona eis requiem) and then "grant them eternal rest" (dona eis requiem sempiternam). The gaze is no longer turned toward the assembly, but toward the departed.^[20]

The Communion: Lux æterna

The communion antiphon closes the loop opened by the Introit, taking up again the theme of light:

"May light eternal shine upon them, O Lord, with Thy saints for ever, for Thou art good. Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them." — Communion Lux æterna^[21]

After the Mass: Libera me and In paradisum

Two pieces, which in strict terms belong to the rite of the absolution and the procession rather than to the Mass itself, are so closely associated with it that most composers joined them to it. First the great responsory Libera me:

"Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death on that dreadful day when the heavens and the earth shall be moved, when Thou shalt come to judge the world by fire." — Responsory Libera me, Domine^[22]

Then, as the body leaves the church, the antiphon In paradisum, which is like the luminous answer to the Dies iræ:

"May the angels lead thee into paradise; at thy coming may the martyrs receive thee and bring thee into the holy city, Jerusalem." — Antiphon In paradisum^[23]

On the meaning of these chants in the course of the funeral rites, see Christian Funerals.

The Requiem Mass was not invented all at once: it settled into shape over more than a millennium.

From early Christian origins to the Middle Ages

From the very first centuries, Christians celebrated the Eucharist over the tombs of the martyrs and offered Mass for their dead; the inscriptions of the catacombs already ask for them refrigerium, "refreshment", and pax, peace. In the early Middle Ages, Gregorian chant gradually fixed the melodies of the proper pieces of the dead, and the Office of the Dead (the hours sung for the departed) developed in the monasteries.^[24] The great impulse came from Cluny: Abbot St Odilo instituted around the year 998 the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed on 2 November, which spread throughout the West.^[25] The Dies iræ sequence was added to the Mass from the 13th–14th century onwards, according to local usages.^[26]

The Tridentine fixing (Missal of 1570)

Until the 16th century, the secondary texts (graduals, tracts, sequences) varied with dioceses and orders: Italy gladly sang the Dies iræ, Spain and France often omitted it. After the Council of Trent, the Roman Missal of St Pius V (1570) unified usage: it fixed the Mass of the dead in the form that would reign for nearly four centuries, making the Dies iræ obligatory throughout the Roman rite.^[27] It is this stable and universal Mass that would offer composers a single text to set to music, from Palestrina to Fauré.

The Tridentine rite of the Mass of the dead

In the Tridentine form, the Mass of the dead has its own decorum: black vestments, candles, and often a catafalque (the castrum doloris, "castle of grief") raised in the middle of the church to represent the absent departed. The Mass is followed by the absolution: the priest walks around the coffin or catafalque, sprinkling it with holy water and incensing it, while the choir sings the Libera me.^[28] Everything in this rite speaks at once of the gravity of death and of trust in mercy: we pray for a brother, we do not condemn him.

This is where the subject fully joins Christian art: no other liturgical text has inspired so many masterpieces. There are more than two thousand settings of the Mass of the dead.^[29] Because its words are fixed and universal, the Requiem became, across the centuries, a kind of laboratory of sacred music in which each age projected its own way of thinking about death, judgment and hope.

From Gregorian chant to polyphony

Originally, the Mass of the dead was sung in plainsong: a single melodic line, sober and grave, whose austere beauty still carries the whole repertory today. On Gregorian chant as such, see Gregorian Chant. From the 15th century onwards, composers began to superimpose voices: this is the birth of the polyphonic Requiem, whose general grammar belongs to Sacred Polyphony.

The first polyphonic Requiems

The first known polyphonic Requiem is that of Guillaume Dufay (c. 1397–1474), composed for the Order of the Golden Fleece and mentioned in his will — but it is lost.^[30] The oldest to have come down to us is that of Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1410–1497), for two, three and four voices, which paraphrases the plainsong: a founding work, of great restraint, on the hinge between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.^[31]

Palestrina, Victoria and the golden age of the Renaissance

The golden age of sacred polyphony produced several Requiems of purified beauty. Palestrina — on whom see Palestrina and the Reform of Sacred Music — left a Missa pro defunctis of exemplary liturgical stripped-down purity. But the summit of the genre at this period is the Officium Defunctorum of Tomás Luis de Victoria (c. 1548–1611), composed in 1603 for the funeral of Empress Maria of Austria and published in 1605: for six voices, of contained intensity, it is often held to be the masterpiece of the Renaissance Requiem and was the last work Victoria wrote.^[32]

The concert Requiem: Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi

In the Baroque and then the Classical age, the Requiem was enriched with the orchestra and sometimes overflowed the liturgical framework to become a concert work. The most famous is the Requiem in D minor, K. 626 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1791), left unfinished at his death — it breaks off in the Lacrimosa — and completed by his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr. A testament-work wrapped in legend, it has become the most performed Requiem in the world; on Mozart and the Catholic Mass, see Mozart and the Catholic Mass.^[33]

The 19th century pushed the genre toward the monumental. Hector Berlioz's Grande Messe des morts (1837) deploys a gigantic orchestra and four brass fanfares for the Tuba mirum.^[34] Giuseppe Verdi's Messa da Requiem (1874), composed in memory of the writer Alessandro Manzoni and premiered at the church of San Marco in Milan, is of such dramatic force that it has sometimes been called — rightly or wrongly — an "opera in liturgical dress": its shattering Dies iræ is one of the best-known pages in all of music.^[35]

Fauré, Duruflé: the Requiem of consolation

"My Requiem … it has been said that it does not express the fear of death; someone has called it a lullaby of death. But that is how I feel death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful passage." — Gabriel Fauré^[36]

Against the terrifying Requiem of Romanticism, Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) wrote a Requiem (Op. 48, in its completed form c. 1890) all of gentleness: he omits the Dies iræ, adds the tender Pie Jesu and crowns the work with the antiphon In paradisum. This intuition — shifting the emphasis from fear of judgment to hope of rest — announces, on the musical plane, what the liturgical reform would do half a century later.^[37] Maurice Duruflé (Op. 9, 1947) continues this line by building his entire Requiem upon the Gregorian melodies of the Graduale Romanum: a return to the sources, at once modern and profoundly liturgical.^[38]

Britten and the Requiem in the 20th century

In the 20th century, the Requiem also became a cry against the violence of the world. Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (Op. 66, 1962), composed for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by bombing, interweaves the Latin text of the Mass of the dead with the poems of the English soldier Wilfred Owen, killed in 1918: the liturgy of the Church and the voice of war's victims answer one another in it.^[39] The Requiem, born for one departed soul, had become able to bear the mourning of entire peoples.

Beyond music, the Mass of the dead left its mark on Christian art: miniatures of the Office of the Dead in books of hours, showing the clergy singing around the coffin; depictions of the Last Judgment directly inspired by the Dies iræ — on which see The Last Judgment Fresco; and the whole funerary art of Baroque catafalques, those ephemeral architectures raised in churches for great funerals. The Requiem Mass thus nourished an entire iconography of Christian death, ever suspended between the fear of judgment and the hope of light.^[40]

The 20th century profoundly transformed the Mass of the dead, in a direction Fauré had already sensed: bringing paschal hope to the fore.

Vatican II and the paschal character

The Second Vatican Council explicitly asked for the rite to be revised:

"The rite for the burial of the dead should express more clearly the paschal character of Christian death, and should respond better to the circumstances and traditions found in each region, even with regard to the liturgical color." — Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum concilium, no. 81 (1963)^[41]

This is the origin of the now widespread use of white or violet vestments rather than black: not to deny mourning, but to stress that the Christian dies in the risen Christ.

The Ordo exsequiarum (1969) and the removal of the Dies iræ

The new funeral rite, the Ordo exsequiarum, was promulgated on 15 August 1969. Its most debated decision was the removal of the Dies iræ sequence from the Mass of the dead. Mgr Annibale Bugnini, the driving force of the reform, justified it in substance: texts judged too marked by fear of judgment had been set aside, in favour of texts expressing Christian hope.^[42] The Dies iræ has not disappeared: it remains, ad libitum, in the Liturgy of the Hours of the last weeks of the liturgical year and of the Commemoration of the Departed.^[43]

This reform was received in different ways: some see in it a just purification of paschal hope; others regret the loss of a text that forcefully recalled the reality of judgment and the need for conversion. Both concerns are legitimate, and the Church holds both truths: Christian death is a passage to life, but it is also an encounter with the Judge, before whom prayer in suffrage keeps all its meaning.

The Mass for the departed today

The Mass for the departed remains fully alive in the ordinary form of the Roman rite: it is offered at funerals, on anniversaries and on 2 November, with its own readings, orations and chant. And the extraordinary form (the 1962 rite), maintained for those attached to it, keeps the traditional Requiem Mass with its Dies iræ and its absolution. In both cases, the essential gesture remains identical: to offer the sacrifice of Christ for the rest of a brother.^[44]

At bottom, the Requiem Mass is a great lesson in charity — charity does not stop at death. To love one who has died is not only to weep for him or to remember him: it is to pray for him, and first of all to have Mass offered for his intention. It is also, for the living, a memento mori: in asking rest for the dead, he recalls that he too will die and be judged. The Requiem thus unites the two sides of Christian life — the gravity of the end and trust in mercy — in a single movement: Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

This twofold truth — filial fear and hope — links the Requiem to the whole Catholic doctrine of the last things: death, judgment, purgatory, heaven. That is why praying for one's dead is never a gesture of despair, but the most concrete expression of the communion of saints: on earth, the Church militant intercedes for the Church suffering, awaiting the day when all, purified, shall see God face to face.

Related Ignispedia articles

• Christian Funerals — the funeral rite, the theology of death, cremation and canon law.
• What Does the Church Say About Purgatory? and Is Purgatory Biblical? — the doctrinal foundation of suffrages.
• The Dies Irae — the great sequence of the Judgment, its text and history.
• Gregorian Chant and Sacred Polyphony — the musical languages of the Requiem.
• Palestrina and the Reform of Sacred Music and Mozart and the Catholic Mass — two masters of the Mass of the dead.
• The Stabat Mater — the other great Latin sequence of sorrow and hope.
• The Last Judgment Fresco — the imagery of the Dies iræ in art.

Principal sources

• Missale Romanum and Graduale Romanum (1962 edition) — proper texts of the Missa pro defunctis.
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1030–1032 (purgatory and suffrages) and 1371 (the sacrifice offered for the departed).
• Council of Trent, decree on purgatory (3 December 1563) and Session XXII on the sacrifice of the Mass (1562).
• Second Vatican Council, constitution Sacrosanctum concilium (1963), no. 81.
• Ordo exsequiarum (Congregation for Divine Worship, 15 August 1969); A. Bugnini, La Riforma liturgica (1948–1975).
• For the musical posterity: R. Chase, Dies Iræ: A Guide to Requiem Music; Grove Music Online entries on Ockeghem, Victoria, Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, Fauré, Duruflé and Britten.