Calvary Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio, is a quiet, lovely, sacred place. Maple and oak trees stretch hundreds of feet into the air, and in November they rain their multicolored canopy onto the quiet graves of the dead. When you speak, your voice dies away instantly among the old stone tombs. Monuments to babies and soldiers sit covered in moss, and simple, uniform plaques lie neatly in plots as nuns and monks rest until the final judgment day.

As you walk down the hill and away from under the trees, to where tombstones become not weathered and gray but red and black, you approach the resting places of people I once knew — the parish “grandpa” who taught my brother and his friends how to serve Mass and me how to fold my hands properly (palms pressed together, right thumb crossing over the left), and a family friend’s child who passed away, just a few months old, having suffered severe birth defects. (READ MORE: Like the Church, Our Republic Needs Martyrs)

Calvary is a peaceful place, and today — Nov. 2, the Feast of All Souls — Catholics will flock to it and to cemeteries across the globe to pray for their dead and for those who left this earth too long ago for us to have known them. It’s a beautiful tradition stretching back to the early ages of the Church.

We know, for instance, from inscriptions in the catacombs that the early Christians prayed both for and to their dead. (The Church considers martyrdom a cause for sainthood, and the Roman Empire bequeathed many.) In one of the earliest Christian writings, the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, the martyr Perpetua relates her experience of a vision of Dinocrates, her younger brother who had died at the age of 7. She told the author, “[H]e was parched and very thirsty, with a filthy countenance and pallid colour, and the wound on his face which he had when he died.” Perpetua proceeded to pray for the soul of her brother, only stopping when he appeared to her again, playing happily, his wound healed and scarred. “Then I understood,” she explained, “that he was translated from the place of punishment.”

Church Fathers also spoke of praying for the dead, in the vein that prayers of those on earth can assist those in Purgatory. St. John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople, writes in his third homily on Philippians:

Let us weep for these; let us assist them according to our power; let us think of some assistance for them, small though it be, yet still let us assist them. How and in what way? By praying and entreating others to make prayers for them, by continually giving to the poor on their behalf. This deed has some consolation.

But while Christians have prayed for the dead for centuries, they didn’t have a feast dedicated to doing so until about the 10th century. St. Odilo, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Cluny — and patron of souls in Purgatory — instituted a commemoration of the dead for his monks on the day after the Feast of All Saints. The practice quickly spread throughout the Church, and, over time, the day became filled with tradition. (READ MORE: Meet the Polish Family Martyred by the Nazis)

In the 15th century, Dominican priests were receiving so many requests to offer Masses for departed souls that they began to celebrate three Masses on All Souls’ Day — a practice that was approved by the Pope in 1748, allowing it to spread throughout the Spanish Empire. This tradition traveled worldwide during World War I, when, due to the great number of dead and the destruction of churches, Pope Benedict XV extended permission to all priests to celebrate three Masses: one for a particular intention, one for the intentions of the Pope, and one for all the dead.

My parents used to shake us kids awake when it was still dark out on All Souls’ Day to pile into our 12-passenger bus and zoom off to attend these three Masses, said quietly and back-to-back. We’d then spend the afternoon at the cemetery praying a Rosary and playing scavenger hunts among the almost 200-year-old graves. I’d like to think that my prayers then — distracted as they were — helped at least one soul obtain eternal rest.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
May they rest in peace. Amen.

Graves at Calvary Cemetery (Aubrey Gulick/The American Spectator)