QUESTION: What is the relation of
Halloween to All Saints/All Souls? Which came first?
Fr. Steve: All Saints Day appears to have
a more ancient genealogy than All Souls Day.
The practice of a festival day to honor the whole communion of
Saints, rather than that just a single saint, seems to happen for the first
time in the Catholic Church with the consecration of the Pantheon as a public
place for the Church’s worship. This happened in the year 609 (or 610) on
May 13th. The Pantheon had been originally dedicated for the
use of Roman religion as a place where all the gods would be honored. Boniface
displaced the images of the gods from their shrines and gave the building over
to the Saints of the Church, particularly the Martyrs. This was a kind of “in
your face” to pagan culture. Boniface was saying that the old gods had
been defeated and were defeated by the faith of the Church’s Martyrs.
Also, May 13th was a day associated in Roman
religion with what was called the festival of the Lemurs or ancestral
spirits. It is likely that Boniface’s choice of this day to claim the
Pantheon for Christian worship was intentional and it was a way of saying that
the Martyrs are the great ancestors of all the baptized and it is their memory
and witness that is rightly honored on the day that Romans recalled their
ancestors.
How we get from May 13th to November 1st is
interesting. The festival of All Saints seems to emerge from the
dedication of another Roman church that was consecrated by Pope Gregory
III. The church is named St. Peter and all the Saints. It was a
subsequent pope, Gregory IV, who extended the annual festival that commemorates
this church dedication to the whole Church as All Saints Day. The
extension of festivals specific to the Church of Rome is an part and parcel of
how the Catholic Faith becomes the underlying cultural matrix from which a new
kind of European civilization would emerge.
All Souls Day (celebrated November 2nd) seems to
emerge with the growth and spread of monastic communities and the practice of
commemorating deceased members of monasteries. This practice gained broad
cultural traction and in time was extended to the whole Church.
Halloween is the precursor to All Saints Day and as such is kind
of like what December 24th is to Christmas Day. Remember, the calendar of the
Church is filled with festival days, all of which were once associated with
great, public celebrations. A holy day of obligation has not always meant
spending 45 minutes in church for Mass and then going back to work. Holy Days
were times for a party and if you look at the Church’s calendar, past and
present, with this ethos in mind you will discover that the reasons for a party
happened with great frequency..
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