The Catholic roots of
Halloween, the Vigil of All Saints' Day
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| "Christ glorified in the court of heaven" by Bd Fra Angelico (detail) |
Although Halloween has been embraced by the secular world,
its foundations are firmly rooted in Catholic tradition. Dr Malcolm Brown of
the Alcuin Institute for Catholic Culture explains the significance of All
Hallows’ Eve.
By Christopher Wells
In the modern world, and especially in English speaking
countries, Halloween has become one of the most important holidays of the year,
with millions of children and adults dressing up as their favourite heroes,
superstars, ghouls and goblins.
While some people have connected Halloween to earlier pagan
celebrations of the new year, Halloween actually has significant Catholic
roots. The name itself comes from All Hallow’s Eve – that is, the Vigil of All
Saints’ Day, when Catholics remember those who have gone before us to enter our
heavenly home. Immediately afterwards, on November 2, the Church commemorates
all the faithful departed still detained in Purgatory, and prays in suffrage
for them.
The memory of those who have gone before us naturally leads
to thoughts of mortality, and the liturgical focus on the end times during this
period of the Church year adds to the atmosphere of gloom.
In a “Memorandum
on the Celebration of Halloween” issued last year for his Diocese,
Bishop David Konderla of Tulsa, Oklahoma, stresses the importance of
“maintaining the Catholic meaning and purpose of all holy days, especially
those which have been adopted and adapted by the culture around us”. He
explains the how customs such as dressing up for Halloween and appealing to
frightful imagery can be done in a Catholic spirit, while warning that “we want
to intentionally avoid those things that are contrary to our Catholic faith,
but have become popularized through the secular adaptation of Halloween”.
Vatican News spoke with Dr Marcel Brown, of the Alcuin
Institute for Catholic Culture in Tulsa, about the Catholic roots of Halloween.
“The feast of Halloween is one of those feasts on the Catholic calendar that is
celebrated on the eve of a great solemnity”, he said.
Dr Brown explained that the word Halloween refers to the
Feast of All Saints. The word itself is taken an older English term, “hallows,”
meaning “holy”; and “e’en”, a truncation of the word evening, in reference to
the Vigil of the feast. “So really, Halloween is the feast of the celebration
of the feast of All Hallows’”, he said. “So it’s a day when Catholics celebrate
the triumph of the Church in heaven, and the lives of the saints on earth”.
The modern focus on the eerie or mysterious also has a
Catholic aspect. “When we think of Halloween, I think we often think of ghosts
and goblins, and ghoulish faces”, Dr Brown said. “But even these, in the
Catholic tradition, are supposed to be reminders of death and of the last
things”.
He continued, “So just as we commemorate the feast of All
Saints on November 1st, beginning with All Hallows’ Eve on
Halloween, we also think about and turn our minds really, to the last things:
death, judgment, heaven, and hell. And really our focus should be, since we all
must die and are destined to judgment, how then we to live?”
In his Memorandum, Bishop Konderla invites to
the faithful to “urge one another this Halloween to express in every detail of
our observance the beauty and depth of the Feast of All Saints”.
“Let us make this year’s celebration”, he says, “an act of
true devotion to God, whose saints give us hope that we too may one day enter
into the Kingdom prepared for God’s holy ones from the beginning of time”.
You can read more about the Catholic roots of Halloween
in Dr Marcel Brown’s article “The
Holy Ghosts of Halloween: Resurrecting a Catholic Feast”, published by the
Adoremus Society for the Renewal of the Sacred Liturgy.
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