As we prepare to celebrate All Saints Day on Sunday, perhaps some of you have wondered at some point: What’s it all about, anyway?
The following may prove helpful:
Every December, the secular, cultural celebration of Christmas overshadows the religious holiday on which it is based. Essentially the same thing happens at the end of October, when the way American culture celebrates Halloween overshadows All Saints Day.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with costumes and candy, but in the minds of most people Halloween has become so detached from its religious roots that they have no idea where it comes from. The old-fashioned word Halloween contributes to this. People may have an inkling that it’s short for “All Hallows Eve,” but that doesn’t help much—because they don’t know what a hallow is or what it means to celebrate the eve of something.
Hallow comes from the same root as holy, and a person who is hallowed is a saint—someone who has been sanctified or made holy. Thus in the Lord’s Prayer we say “Hallowed be thy name.” The –een part of Halloween is similarly old-fashioned. “E’en” is a contraction of the word even, an older way of saying “evening.” Halloween is thus “All hallows e’en” or “the evening of All Saints Day,” and it came to be celebrated as an early anticipation of the day that followed, the same way people celebrate Christmas Eve in anticipation of Christmas Day.
But why celebrate All Saints Day in the first place? Some people object to the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican custom of celebrating certain saints and giving them special attention. Aware that there are liturgical days commemorating individual saints, they want to know why there aren’t celebrations for all the other people in heaven. After all, in Revelation John describes the population of heaven this way:
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Rev. 7:9-10).
Don’t all those other people deserve recognition, too?
The answer is that they do, and this is why we have All Saints Day. Since there are only 365 days in the year, not every person in heaven can have his own liturgical commemoration, but they all should be recognized for the way they cooperated with God’s grace. Thus All Saints Day was created to commemorate every last individual in heaven, even those who salvation is known to God alone.
So if your departed grandmother is in heaven, even though she’s never been canonized, on All Saints Day the Church commemorates her and the work God did in her life. She, too, has a place in the liturgical calendar, alongside the more famous saints.
Precisely when that day occurs will depend which liturgical calendar you are using.
In the West, November 1 became the date on which all the saints are commemorated. Sometimes people will try to tarnish this with pagan associations, claiming that it was based on the Gaelic holiday Samhain, as celebrated in the British Isles.
But All Saints Day didn’t originate in the British Isles. The reason November 1 was picked is that Pope Gregory III (731-741) dedicated a chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to all the saints and fixed its anniversary as November 1.
Both Catholics and Protestants say the Apostles’ Creed, and when we do so we profess belief in “the communion of saints.” The celebration of All Saints Day is one of the ways we live out this profession.
(Adapted from Jimmy Akin, “What’s the Point of All Saints?”, October 2018)
