424 South 30th Street, Tacoma, WA 98402 Parish Office: 253-383-4549
November 8th
November8,2015
Dear Parishioners,
Sunday, November 1 is All Saints Day, the day on which Catholics celebrate all the saints, known and unknown. It is a surprisingly old feast day in the Church. It arose out of the Christian tradition of celebrating the martyrdom of saints on the anniversary of their martyrdom. When martyrdoms increased during the persecutions of the late Roman Empire, local dioceses instituted a common feast day in order to ensure that all martyrs, known and unknown, were properly honored.
History of All Saints Day
By the late fourth century, this common feast was celebrated in Antioch, Saint Ephrem the Syrian mentioned it in a sermon in 373. In the early centuries, this feast was celebrated in the Easter season, and the Eastern Churches, both Catholic and Orthodox, still celebrate it then.
The current date of November 1 was instituted by Pope Gregory III (731-741), when he consecrated a chapel to all the martyrs in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome and ordered an annual celebration. This celebration was originally confined to the diocese of Rome, but Pope Gregory IV (827-844) extended the feast to the entire Church and orderedit to be celebrated on November 1.
The vigil or eve of the feast, October 31, (yesterday for those of you reading this on Sunday,) is commonly known as All Hallows Eve, or Halloween. Despite concerns among some Christians (including some Catholics) in recent years about the "pagan origins" of Halloween, the vigil was celebrated from the beginning—long before Irish practices, stripped of their pagan origins (just as the Christmas tree was stripped of similar connotations). Lost in the debate is the history of Halloween, which, far from being a pagan religious event, is actually a Christian celebration that's almost 1,700 years old, the last 1,300 on November 1st.
The Christian Origins of Halloween
"Halloween" is a name that means nothing by itself. It is a contraction of "All Hallows Eve," and it designates the vigil of All Hallows Day, more commonly known today as All Saints Day. "Hallow," as a noun, is an old English word for saint. As a verb, it means to make something holy or to honor it as holy.
Despite concerns among some Catholics and other Christians in recent years about the "pagan origins" of Halloween, there really are none. The first attempts to show some connection between the vigil of All Saints and the Celtic harvest festival of Samhain came over a thousand years after All Saints Day became a universal feast, and there's no evidence whatsoever that Gregory III or Gregory IV was even aware of Samhain. In Celtic peasant culture, however, elements of the harvest festival survived, even among Christians, just as the Christmas tree owes its originsto pre-Christian Germanic traditions without being a pagan ritual.
As Catholic Christians we should however portray and communicate what Halloween is really about. It would be great to teach your kids about the truth of what Halloween is, while at the same time to explain that, as Catholics, we do believe in the reality of evil. Perhaps pray the St. Michael prayer with your children to help teach them the protection we have against evil as long as we don’t open ourselves up to it. Tie the vigil explicitly to the Feast of All Saints, and explain to your children why we celebrate that feast, so that they won't view All Saints Day as "the boring day when we have to go to church before we can eat some more candy."
Let's reclaim Halloween for Christians, by returning to its roots in the Catholic Church!