Today's Catholic Tradition: Bread of the Dead

Today is the day that Christians began to prepare food such as bread of the dead and soul cakes for the feast of All Souls. In some areas people would beg for ingredients to make these cakes on this day.

A soul cake was a sort of oat cake, which, in Catholic times was baked specially as a gift for poor and needy people, and these people on receiving it would pray for the dead belonging to those who gave it.

Fire has always been a symbol of immortality, and the immortality of the soul was symbolized by lighting fires during the night of All Souls; perhaps the simpler people thought that their little furze fires dotted over the hillsides would show the way to souls who were that day making their journey from purgatory to heaven! Long after the Catholic faith had been cast out of this country, relics remained at Soulmass of the once universal praying for the dead, though, as was inevitable, these became empty and corrupt. Even in the 19th century girls still went "souling" from door to door; people baked and ate soul cakes, people, who would have abhorred the idea that the dead can be helped by prayers, would say on this day:

"A soul cake, a soul cake, God have mercy on all Christian souls for a soul cake."

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