By Roy Rasmussen | For On Mission
As secular culture celebrates Halloween, Catholics celebrate All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. What’s the difference? Here’s some background on these important feasts and tips on how to celebrate them.
How All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day became part of the Catholic calendar
Honoring and praying for the dead was common among ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans, who were the first converts to Christianity. We see references to Masses honoring the dead as early as the Letter to the Hebrews (11:1-12:13) and Book of Revelation (6:9-11). In A.D. 211, the theologian Tertullian wrote that Christians made annual offerings for the dead as “birthday honors,” celebrating rebirth into new life.
Each local church kept lists of its martyrs and holy men and women to be read during the Eucharistic Prayer at Mass, just as we do today. Churches shared lists, and by the fourth century, Christians in what is now Turkey were celebrating an annual spring Mass near the Ascension and Pentecost in honor of all the martyrs, referenced by St. Ephrem and St. John Chrysostom. On May 13 in either A.D. 609 or 610, Pope St. Boniface IV consecrated a church to St. Mary and the Martyrs and inaugurated the annual Feast of All Holy Martyrs.
Many pilgrims began visiting Rome on May 13, creating the problem of how to feed them in early spring. To solve this, in A.D. 844, Pope Gregory IV moved the feast to the end of the harvest on November 1, the present date of the Solemnity of All Saints. It became a holy day of obligation in the Carolingian Empire at that time, and since 1484, it has been obligatory for all Catholics.
Toward the beginning of the eleventh century, St. Odilo of Cluny, a Benedictine abbot, initiated the practice among Benedictines of designating the day after the Feast of All Saints as a day “of all the departed ones” (Omnium Defunctorum). This practice spread and became universal in the 14th century, as our present All Souls’ Day.
How does Halloween fit in?
The term “Halloween” is an abbreviation of “All Hallows’ Eve,” the English name for the eve of All Saints’ Day. In parts of the British Isles with Celtic or Gaelic heritage, such as Ireland and Scotland, Halloween coincided with a pre-Christian festival called Samhain, first recorded in ninth-century Irish literature.
Popular folklore held that the dead visited their relatives at this time, and demons and witches roamed the land. To appease the dead and protect themselves, people performed rituals such as lighting bonfires, leaving food for the dead, and disguising themselves as the dead to hide from them and receive their food. These practices were brought to the United States by Irish and Scottish immigrants in the 19th century, inspiring traditions such as jack-o’-lanterns and trick-or-treating.
Meanwhile, a Welsh scholar named John Rhŷs theorized that Samhain was a Celtic New Year’s festival and the origin of Halloween. Scholars dispute whether Samhain was truly a New Year’s festival. All Saints’ Day was around centuries before it was moved to November 1, yet pop culture continues to perpetuate Rhŷs’s claims.
All Saints’ Day: Honoring the saints
For Catholics, All Saints’ Day expresses our faith in what the Apostles’ Creed calls “the communion of saints”: the common bond in the Body of Christ shared between the saints in heaven who have overcome sin and death (the Church Triumphant), the dead souls in purgatory who are being purified of sin (the Church Suffering), and living Christians who are fighting sin as pilgrims on Earth and soldiers of Christ (the Church Militant). We believe that by overcoming sin on Earth and being purified in purgatory, we will join the saints in heaven who have already conquered sin and death.
This belief inspires hope in our heavenly reward, which gives us the courage to imitate the example of the saints. All Saints’ Day falls within the period of the church calendar that looks forward in hope to Christ’s Second Coming and our own resurrection and heavenly glory.
On All Saints’ Day, we also exercise charity and the virtue St. Thomas Aquinas called “observance” (observantia), the part of the virtue of justice that consists in paying due honor to persons in positions of dignity by recognizing their excellence. We owe honor to the saints because of their holiness, the sacrifices they made to achieve it, and the aid they render us through their prayers.
All Souls’ Day: Praying for the dead
Where All Saints’ Day honors the Church Triumphant in heaven, All Souls’ Day honors and prays for the Church suffering in purgatory. Those in purgatory are on their way to heaven, so we honor their victory. But they’re still on the way because they won’t be made perfect until they fulfill their penance for sins committed when they were alive.
We can help them fulfill their penance faster by praying to God and the saints for mercy on their behalf and by asking to let them share in the merits of good deeds done by the saints and by us while we’re still alive. Catholics believe that because we’re all united in the Body of Christ, we all share in a treasury of merits, flowing from Christ’s infinite merits and distributed through Mary and the saints’ intercession. So we can ask Mary and the saints to pray for the holy souls in purgatory. In so doing, we gain merits by performing a spiritual act of mercy.
How to celebrate All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days
The feasts of All Saints and All Souls give us many opportunities to deepen our devotion to the saints and the holy souls in purgatory:
- When attending Mass on All Saints’ Day, offer thanks to your favorite saints and ask for their intercession.
- Go to confession before Mass if you have sins to confess in order to receive the Eucharist.
- Attend Mass on All Souls’ Day and pray for deceased family and loved ones.
- Have a Gregorian Mass said for someone who is deceased.
- Attend Adoration
- Visit a cemetery on All Souls’ Day and pray for the dead.
- Pray the Glorious and Sorrowful Mysteries, reflecting on the Church Triumphant and Suffering.
- Pray the Litany of the Saints
- Pray the Prayer of St. Gertrude
- Do Lectio Divina Scripture meditation on passages about the saints, heaven, or purgatory.
Remember that All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day fall on Saturday and Sunday, respectively, this year, so the normal holy day of obligation requirement for All Saints’ Day is suspended, but attendance is still encouraged, and Sunday attendance remains obligatory.