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ALL HALLOW'S EVEEvery year, on October 31, the secular, cultural celebration of Halloween overshadows the celebration of All Saints’ Day on which it is based.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. English has an unusual double-vocabulary, with many words based on Latin roots but others based on German roots. That’s why we have two words for so many things. One example is cat (derived from a German root) and feline (derived from a Latin root). The word hallow belongs to one of these German-Latin pairs. But it’s much less familiar to us than the parallel word from Latin: saint.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.” If we said that using words derived from Latin, it would be something like “Let your name be sanctified” – i.e., may people treat God’s name as something holy and thus honor the holiness of God himself. 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 anticipation of the day that followed.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. All Saints’ Day came to be a very important liturgical day, and today it is a holy day of obligation, meaning that Catholics must observe it by going to Mass, as they do on Sundays.This makes All Saints different from the commemorations of individual saints. None of the saints living after biblical times is commemorated with holy days of obligation. However famous saints like Augustine, Aquinas, and Thérèse of Lisieux may be, they don’t have such an important day on the liturgical calendar. But the whole body of the saints in heaven do.All Saints’ Day was created to commemorate every last individual in heaven, even those whose salvation is known to God alone. So, if your faithfully departed grandmother is in heaven, even though she’s never been canonized, on All Saints’ Day, the Catholic 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. The Catholic Church thus not only remembers individual saints; it takes seriously its profession of the entire communion of saints.Fr. Jay BananalPastor
