The Song That Never Ends, by Joseph Pearce

By Joseph Pearce, Crisis Magazine, Nov. 1, 2025

Joseph Pearce is Visiting Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University and a Visiting Fellow of Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (Merrimack, New Hampshire). The author of over thirty books, he is editor of the St. Austin Review, series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions, senior instructor with Homeschool Connections, and senior contributor at the Imaginative Conservative and Crisis Magazine. His personal website is http://www.jpearce.co.

As we celebrate All Saints and All Souls, it is a good time to remember that these Feast days specifically call to mind all the forgotten Saints and holy souls.

[Editor’s Note: This is the final in a multi-part series on the unsung heroes of Christendom.]

As we come to the end of this series, there is time for one final song for the unsung, a sort of swan song, a final elegy and eulogy for those unknown heroes and heroines whose passing from this life went unheeded and unheralded but who have been sung to their rest by ministering angels. Whereas those who have been the focus of the previous essays have all left their mark on history in the sense that their names are known to posterity, albeit not as well-known as they should be, this final song will be of the nameless ones, the vast majority of humankind, whose names have been completely erased from the historical record.

The nameless ones are those whose names are no longer legible on the weather-worn tombstones that mark their resting place. They lived, to be sure; they loved and were loved, we can assume; they might have had children who also had children of their own, and whose children’s children are oblivious of their ever having lived. Their sins are forgotten as are their virtues. …

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