November is a great month of remembering. We begin with All Saints and All Souls
Days later we of course will celebrate Remembrance Day on November 11th. St.
Ephrem, the Syrian, first mentions the practice of remembering the unknown martyrs at
the beginning of November in a homily in 373. It was Pope Gregory III who first proclaimed
All Saints Day on November 1st when he consecrated a chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica to all
the unknown martyrs in Rome. Gregory IV made All Saints Day and All Souls Day a universal feast day in 831.
I mention all this because it has become fashionable to proclaim that Halloween is
some ancient pagan feast that the Church wished to suppress with All Saints Day. This is
simply not true on so many levels. Read more: The Ancient Irish Get Far Too Much Credit
for Halloween | Ancient Origins. Halloween is just a product of empty secular spiritualism.
On the other hand, All Saints Day, All Souls Day and the practice of praying for the dead
are foundational to our faith. We all have a sense that our deceased loved ones still live in
our thoughts and memories, yet we realize this is only partial and fleeting. How much
more does a person live on in the love of God, who knew and loved that person perfectly?
Yet, sin gets in the way of God’s love. The dead, particularly those close to us, need our
prayers to help them receive forgiveness so that they can become more and more open to
God’s love. When we remember someone in our thoughts we bind them to our memories.
More wonderfully, when we remember someone at mass or in our prayers we bind them
to God’s heart.
Those most open to God are the saints who continue to participate in the ministry of
God’s love in the Church. As members of Christ’s Church, our religious remembering binds us together as a grace-filled member of Christ’s Body. I commend you to pray for
all the members of the Church… both living and dead… so that we may all live in Christ.