Eamon Duffy writes:

Prayer for the dead is neither fear nor fire insurance, emphatically not an attempt to appease an angry or sadistic God. It is an exercise in the virtues of faith and hope and love.

For prayer for the dead is also a bridge across the gulf of separation which is death. We are social beings, but most of us can expect to die alone, in a hospital bed rather than in our homes. Death is the ultimate alienation, the sacramental expression of all the barriers which divide us. Medieval Christianity witnessed against that isolation by constantly remembering the dead, recalling their names, in the liturgy and in private: the dead remained part of the church community . The Reformation, in silencing all naming of the dead in prayer, unwittingly endorsed the experience of death as alienation.

Images of purgatory come and go, some better than others, none of them essential. We do not pray for the dead to bail them out of prison or to placate a God who demands satisfaction, but because we know that they live in Christ, bound to us in a single faith and hope and love, and therefore with a right to a place in our prayers. We feel ourselves diminished by their deaths, and that has a reality in faith as well as in natural experience.

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Duffy in The Tablet. Author of the terrific book The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400 to c. 1580, Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity, and Fellow and Director of Studies, Magdalene College, The University of Cambridge.