This is the movement of the Holy Family.

Welcome to our daily rosary meditation.

Let's begin in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Let's call to mind all those we've promised to pray for.

We say in the creed that on this day, Holy Saturday, Jesus descended into hell.

But hell is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word Shaol and the Greek word Hades,

which both meant the state after death.

The catechism tells us that Jesus did not descend into hell to deliver the damned, but to death, to free the just who had died before him and take them into heaven.

To appreciate what Jesus did on this day by going to all the people who died before his resurrection,

all the innumerable people who dwelt in death. We need to understand what death was like

before Jesus and what it would be like without Jesus. Now we understand death as Christians. Now that Jesus

has opened heaven to us, we view death as being welcomed into heaven by our relatives and friends

who went before us. But before Holy Saturday, well, that was a very different experience.

When you died, you were just alone, totally and completely alone.

No friends, no relatives, and completely separated from God, just alone.

And to me, that is the most frightening thing imaginable.

Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict, wrote,

In truth, one thing is certain, there exists a night into whose solitude no voice reaches.

There is a door through which we can only walk alone, the door of death.

In the last analysis, all the fear in the world is fear of this loneliness.

Death is absolute loneliness.

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