Today is Halloween — and, as you may have noticed, many of our Evangelical friends now shun America’s October spook festival altogether. They tell their children that Halloween is “the devil’s holiday” and that trick-or-treating is little better than dabbling with a Ouija board or consulting an astrologer.
Contemplating the Idea of Death
Though such extremism might seem odd or funny to many of us, it’s really, in one sense, quite admirable. If I thought Halloween was what they think it is, I’d keep my kids away from it, too — no matter how odd it might seem to others. But I’m afraid that if our separated brethren don’t stop for a moment and listen to some good old-fashioned Catholic wisdom on this subject, they’ll all be forced to become Jehovah’s Witnesses before long. And that, I think you’ll agree, would be terrible. Let’s try to spare them that fate, at least.
What exactly is Halloween all about?
Basically Halloween is our local manifestation of one of mankind’s oldest and most basic impulses: the impulse to contemplate — and even to celebrate — the idea of death during the fall of the year.
After all, the natural world itself dies in the autumn, and that death (along with our sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection for it next spring) has always set human beings to contemplating their own impending date with mortality. The pre-Christian world was positively overflowing with these local death festivals. Whether it was the turning of the leaves along the Danube or the first frost on the haystacks of Burgundy, the pagans who lived in Europe before the coming of Christianity found something driving them to tell ghost stories around the end of October, to dress in creepy costumes, and to build bonfires against a new (and not entirely unpleasant) chill in the air. In some places, dances were held to drive away evil spirits; in others, it was believed that the shades of departed loved ones might take a holiday from Hades on this particular night, and could turn up at your doorstep for a spooky reunion.
Inculturation Is an Old Tradition
Before too long however, Catholic missionaries went to Europe from the East and preached the Gospel of Jesus to these cheery, superstitious heathens. Their fiery crusades against pagan idolatry are the stuff of legend: they inspired their converts to chop down the sacred groves, to smash their idols, and to turn instead to the worship of the one true God, Who created heaven and earth. But these missionaries had another quality as well, an attribute that’s often glossed over in hostile secular accounts. That attribute was empathy.
These early missionaries actually liked the people they were converting. They liked their folkways, and their culture. They liked their music, their dances, and even their local death festivals — or liked, at any rate, everything about them that could be liked without compromising the faith. Interestingly enough, we know from history that Pope Gregory sent his missionaries out with explicit instructions that anything in the local culture which was not actually incompatible with Christianity was to be left strictly alone. Today, we call this approach “missionary inculturation,” and most of us have realized that it isn’t really necessary for a Bantu tribesman to put on a three-piece suit before we allow him to come to church. We may feel very enlightened when we take this approach today, but the truth is that the whole evangelization of Western Europe (325-1100 AD) was accomplished under this principle.
This is the real reason why many Christian holy days correspond to older festivals from the pre-existing pagan calendar. The Europeans, for example, had many cherished family traditions surrounding their winter solstice festivals, and so the Church allowed them to incorporate many of these customs (Christmas trees, etc.) into her nativity celebrations. Likewise, Easter was already a spring holy day for the pagans, devoted to the contemplation of rebirth, new life, and resurrection. It was only natural, then, that many of these ancient customs found themselves gaining new and deeper significance under the reign of Christ, the true God of springtime and fertility.
The pagan death festivals were superceded in just this way by two Christian holy days based on a similar theme — All Saints Day (November 1) and All Souls Day (November 2). The pagans found it natural to remember their departed loved ones at this time of the year, and the Church wisely allowed them to maintain continuity with the old ways. To say, however, that the Church merely “Christianized” the existing paganism is to miss the point badly. As St. Paul dramatically points out in his Epistle to the Romans, paganism already had a good deal of inchoate truth in it already. What the Church actually did was to gather up some of these inchoate truths, sift out what was patently unusable, and then point the pagans to the final fulfillment of their ancient longings as revealed in the faith of Christ.
An Echo-Holiday
And yet Halloween isn’t quite All Saints Day, is it? Or All Souls Day. What is it then?
You might say that Halloween is an “echo-holiday.” Halloween is to All Saints & All Souls Days as Mardi Gras is to Ash Wednesday — sort of their outlaw second cousin. Halloween is that part of the ancient death festivals which couldn’t quite be comfortably domesticated. It’s the part that still wants to run wild on the autumn winds, to soap windows and overturn outhouses. And yes, like Mardi Gras, this urge is difficult decently to restrain at times; the sowing of wild oats often produces crops that have to be reaped by the whirlwind. But just because a thing is subject to abuse doesn’t mean the thing itself is evil — a principle that our Evangelical friends have sometimes forgotten when the subject was wine, and we ourselves have often needed to be reminded of when the subject was sex.
Yet it isn’t the puritanical aspect of Evangelicalism that causes me to worry about a possible descent towards the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s the knee-jerk response that Halloween is to be feared solely because it has “pagan origins.” The truth is that a good deal of what all of us do every day has pagan origins. The mathematics we use has pagan origins; our form of government has pagan origins; the very letters with which this sentence is written have pagan origins. In fact, most of the churches from which these anti-paganism sermons issue are, architecturally speaking, Greek revival temples in the “neo-classical style.” So “pagan origins” alone isn’t quite enough to damn Halloween all by itself. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the great glories of Christianity that it does save and redeem and baptize pagan things — ourselves included!
Jehovah’s Witnesses, on the other hand, profess to despise everything associated with our pre-Christian past. They especially despise the practices of the Catholic Church that redeem various elements of that pre-Christian past. They teach their disciples to hate and fear all holy days and holidays alike, and will have nothing to do with either Christmas or Easter for precisely the same reasons that Evangelicals are now despising Halloween.
And this is the reason I have found it worthwhile to mount, from time to time, a Christian defense of Halloween. Because one day — perhaps not too long from now — my own friends and relatives are going to feel forced, by their own careless presuppositions, to drop the other shoe on all holidays, to spend December without Christmas, and springtime without Easter, to go to a ballgame and refuse to sing the National Anthem.
If you find, as I do, that such a prospect makes your skin crawl a little, I hope you’ll join me tonight in soaping a few windows or turning over an outhouse or two. For truth’s sake.
Happy Halloween!
October 31st, 2008 at 6:13 am
Excellent article. Thank you.
October 31st, 2008 at 7:05 am
I used to homeschool my kids. Many reasons prompted me to find alternatives (Catholic schools). One of the more prominent reasons was the villification of Halloween. I never agreed with it and never saw any firm reason in it. I did see a lot of self-righteous judgment and intolerance, though. That’s not Christ-like behavior.
I hope people will distribute this article–and then go have fun tonight!
Lucky
October 31st, 2008 at 7:14 am
Now in my early sixties, I remember back to my youth and the fun and good eats that was Halloween. Not even as a child did I associate Halloween with evil. You see, my dear parents insured that my siblings and I were taught and brought up in the Catholic Tradition. We were never conflicted between Church holidays and civil celebrations. I enjoy and encourage Halloween festivities… just don’t turn over my outhouse! By the way, today we also celebrate my wife’s birthday - she’s such a witch.
October 31st, 2008 at 9:00 am
As a child growing up in a large Catholic family (11 kids) in a small town, Halloween was an community-wide fest. We had a costume contest for the whole town with cash prizes and afterwards they showed a real movie in the local high school gym, including 2 Warner Bros. cartoons, on the big screen! After that we were all given 2 FULL SIZED CANDY BARS!!!
I loved Halloween then as it NEVER overshadowed All Saints Day or All Souls Day (also my birthday) in those days. We also had those days off from school, too, in my Catholic grade school.
But as a mom, we avoided celebrating this festival–not because of its roots, but because of what it has become. The children coming to our door were sometimes in outrageous costumes (Freddy Krueger, etc.) Plus, I didn’t want my kids inhaling all the sugar.
Instead we began an alternate celebration. We would go out to dinner as a family (a rare treat) and then go to an All Saints Day Party or an alternative party at one of the churches. As the kids got older, we would go to a family movie and create memories that way.
More and more communities have alternate celebrations and many Catholic groups host All Saints Day parties where kids dress up in Saints and Angel costumes.
My main point is that as Catholics if you want to still celebrate Halloween in our culture, I hope you will find a way to “rechristianize it–as I believe many evangelicals now do.
October 31st, 2008 at 10:27 am
I think the article brings up some good points. For as long as I can remember actually caring at all about this festival , about 14. It has always seemed strange and a little unchristian to me. Personally , i think we should continue in the same vain as the missionaries did and accept that part of this festival that is not unchristian. That being said, pranks, stealing candy from children by scaring them, toilet papering peoples houses, and glorifing villians or even the devil himself ( all very normal parts of the current american tradition) are not compatible with christianity. Dressing up as one of the saints or some other person or fanciful being is fun. Dressing up as the evil queen from disney movies or the devil because the are ‘cool’ is not christian , because evil is not ‘cool’.
I think the article overstates it’s case a bit against the evangelicals. Many of them don’t like halloween because of what goes on that day, not because of it’s past or history.
My though from a catholic prespective is called back to Paul’s teachigns about pagan things. ‘ If a man does it for God then good for him, weather he obstains for God or partakes for God , let his master judge him rather then his fellow servants ‘
In essential things unity, in all else liberty.
October 31st, 2008 at 10:50 am
I wish to offer what was in today’s newspaper of the Italian Conference of Bishops, “L’Avvenire” (with the reminder that as Bishop of Rome, Joseph Ratzinger is a member of the Italian Conference of Bishops). This is a translated excerpt from the article entitled “A Night Illuminated by the Faces of the Saints”, written by Matteo Liut:
[All Hallow's Eve] is a luminous holiday which with its rays of light reaches the darkest outposts of our existence and fills them with the hope that comes from the Risen One. It is with this spirit that the Christian communities in our country [Italy] are preparing themselves for celebrating the feast day of remembrance [remembering the dead]. A celebration which begins today with Vespers for the vigil of the feast of All Saints day and which will proceed through to Sunday, Nov. 2nd, day dedicated to the dead. Two days which in the tradition of Christian spirituality contain very real and efficacious lessons on the subject of death and eternal life. Through the saints [...] we are invited to embrace the presence of God as the only way of fully realizing our existence, and through the remembrance of the dead our gaze is propelled beyond death, the tragedy of which is not denied, to hope in a life which never ends.
This is the message of the Italian Bishops which also warns [...] about the exageration of festivites which are all too often distant or disassociated [from the spiritual and religious nature of these holidays]. Bishop Giuseppe Zenti of Verona, writing about the proclivity of transforming this holy night into a “party of the spirits” says, “Death is a very serious reality…If the object of Halloween is to reduce that reality to mere virtual reality, like a game, whoever has any sense of duty and responsibility, cannot fail to realize the risk [to which we expose our culture and existence].
An appeal is also made by the Bishop of Acerra, Giovanni Rinaldi, who reminds us that Halloween risks subplanting the memory of religious and civil history of Italy. This prelate invites the parish priests of his diocese to keep the churches open tonight in order to uphold the traditions most cherished by Christians: prayer and the adoration of our Lord of Light.
“The saints are exceptional men and women of faith and love who have filled history with meaning and value. On the night of this feast which has been stolen from the splendor of the saints in order to dedicate it to that which is only about death and fear, the ProSanctitate movement proposes an occasion to remain in the company of the saints and to rediscover through their lives all the love, truth, justice and real fraternity which choosing Christ generates in life.
In the diocese of Perugia, the youth apostolate has propsed an evening with the theme “staying up all night with the saints”. The Archbishop of Perugia, Giuseppe Chiaretti, hopes that “this alternative way of spending Halloween may provide a propitious moment for reflecting on the Christian sense of death–and that it may be an opportunity for evangelizing the young people, helping them to encounter the Lord in a life of light and hope [the life of a saint] inspired by the Gospels”.
October 31st, 2008 at 12:59 pm
There is a lot in holloween that is compatible with christianity and a lot that is not. As far as dressing our kids out as angels and saints - all the costumes end up looking alike. It might be best to celebrate history. After all, history is full of people who are now in their graves, and history is something that should be celebrated. Why not dress up like Nepoleon or a Confederate soldier or a violin player on the Titanic. Then, there would be different costumes and there would be more meaning to the holiday. Saints would be an option still, and also inanimate things would still work into the mesh. These are just some hasty thoughts on the subject.
October 31st, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Yes, a good, readable history is debated here about the merits of Halloween verses All-Hallow’s Eve, but let me turn up the heat just a bit and forgo the PC talk. This article is more smooth-tongued and reactionary than Obama’s responses to the Pro-Life questions in the final debate, and lacking in just about as much true helpfulness, too. Halloween is not a Catholic Holiday. It just isn’t, so it really doesn’t make any difference what the Jehovah Witness’s or Evangelicals or Protestants or the Hindu’s or Muslims think about its current celebrations in the Good Old USA.
The question is what do we who are Catholic do with the current overlaying of Halloween over All-Hallow’s Eve which was previously overlaid on various European pagan harvest festival? I don’t know if Rod really meant to imply this, but the take home message I get from reading his argument for celebrating Halloween is that it’s really just too irresistibly fun to jump in and play with the pagans at times like Halloween and Marti Gras, so, golly gee, why not? Shucks, who’s gonna mind any way, except a couple prudish old bishops and popes?
Saving all scriptural debates on the sorts of things we are instructed to and not to fill our minds with, the really unfortunate reality of Satan and his demons that Rod completely ignores, and even the philosophical debate about putting a stumbling block in the path of immature Christians by dabbling in - or should I say dressing up in - sin, just a little bit, how about encouraging some really fantastic alternative celebrations, as our papal forefathers did when they created All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, instead of capitulating to the popular culture of the day? Come on fellow parents!! We can do way better than look the other way on Halloween.
Put on your creativity cap and organize a saint’s party at church. Keep everyone home, dress up as a saints, and give tricker treaters king-sized candy bars wrapped in a hopeful, positive scripture verse or give them a glow-in-the-dark rosary. If dentist can give our toothbrushes and toothpaste, I think we can begin to toss in religious items without missing a beat. Don’t cower to the pressure to get a little pagan; have saintly courage and get a LOT Catholic on the issue of Halloween!
October 31st, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Lucky,
There are lots of flavors of homeschoolers, including some who dress up and go trick or treating, and also hand out holy picture cards along with candy to the kids at our door!
October 31st, 2008 at 1:20 pm
I used to enjoy Halloween. As a kid, it was super fun to collect free candy for hours, trade off the stuff I didn’t like with my nine younger siblings, and have the next day off!
However, in recent years, we’ve seen Halloween go from fun to frightful, and really quite sinister. Halloween has increasingly glorified gore, horror, and scandalously sexy costumes. Fear is the devil’s number one tool! Be not afraid, says the Lord. Halloween, in my humble opinion, has gotten out of control. I just don’t know how to justify it anymore.
October 31st, 2008 at 1:46 pm
So what happens when Thanksgiving becomes, in the media and the schools, all about thanking the earth for the harvest and being “green”? Do we stop celebrating it too? Why do we keep letting the culture define things instead of standing firm and claiming our space.
October 31st, 2008 at 2:06 pm
It is Halloween. The devil does not own this holiday. It is a day to meet or re-meet neighbors. It is a day to laugh together before the election. It is a day to dress up and have a good time. Go to mass on All Saints day or say a rosary. There is nothing sinful about Halloween in itself. Enjoy the candy and the kids dressed in costumes. It’s a blast.
October 31st, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Catherine, Are you in Italy? I’m curious because I have never known Halloween, as we celebrate it here in the USA, to be celebrated there. My husband is from the Abruzzo region and his family never even knew about Halloween until they moved here ( family who still live there, do not celebrate Halloween either). They always celebrated All Saints Day with festivities and Hallows Eve parties.
I agree with many posters that Halloween has changed so much over the years. I’m grateful my children enjoy good wholesome (modest) costumes, many times dressing as saints or people they admire, and they have fun in the neighborhood or at friends’ parties. Occasionally we will attend All Saints Parties when the churches in the area hold them ( which sadly isn’t too often).
Like Kirby, we too hand out Holy cards/Saint cards with our treats!
October 31st, 2008 at 2:40 pm
For years i have been disturbed that it is the teachers and not the children who are the engines driving the ubiquitous pumpkins, witches, black cats and skeletons in the schools the entire month of October.
This year, for the first time I heard some parents complaining about how hard it was to talk their young children into going out for “trick or treat” tonight. The kids didn’t even want to go.
Halloween is becoming more of an excuse for adults to act like children and indulge their horror-movie and demonic likings.
The parents ought to learn something from their children here. It’s a teadhable moment and a great chance to start your own family tradition of doing something more reflective of the feast of all saints.
October 31st, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Rats. That should read “teachable” moment.
October 31st, 2008 at 2:43 pm
I think it may have to do with prudent assessment of the neighborhood, etc. We’ve never allowed out kids to dress in evil or satanic, etc costumes–no witches, ghosts, etc. I definitely avoid shopping in stores or in areas of stores with the scary stuff. Our neighborhood is rally tame and kid-friendly, and we avoid the really scary houses. We have always attended or hosted an All-Saints party the next day or weekend.
Early on with our older kids, I was more “Focus on the Family” focused rather than Catholic focused (religiously listened to the half/hour program every day!) and was more obsessed with Halloween is evil, etc. (Of course, I was nervous about “worshipping” Mary as well–yikes!) I think there is room for what parents think best for their own families–for instance, if I had a sensitive child with an overactive imagination, we might not trick or treat for a while, and stick to the saints parties.
October 31st, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Dear SanGabriel,
I am indeed in Italy. When I first came over 20 years ago there was no Halloween. But in the last 15 years, what with the flood of British/American film and TV products, Italy has assumed more and more those values and that kind of culture. About seven years ago the idea of Halloween started getting around in a vague sort of way but then suddenly, Halloween stuff appeared in the big stores–and before anybody had any idea what to do with it. Southern Italy (and I guess for present purposes I can put Abruzzo in the southern-Italian category) seems to remain fairly innoculated against these foreign incursions, and I think it may be because for them, faith, tradition and identity are all one thing; and then they are generally happy with who they are, so these foreign things don’t tempt them in the same way they do Italians in the north. And that’s putting things very broadly.
These two feast days (All Saints/all Souls) are very important though for all Italians. Here in the little town where I live, the cemetary has been like a bee-hive of activity over this past week with family members polishing tomb-stones and making preparations for the flowers which are already filling up the cemetery (I just came from there a few hours ago and there is the most intense perfume of white lilies which really do make the place smell like heaven ), but the greater part will arrive tomorrow. And then all the votive candles which must be set out and the vases and little electric “perpetual” lamps which need cleaning and fixing. Anyway, it is a real miracle to behold afterwards–that is, the cemetery at night with thousands and thousands of red and white votive candles winking and flickering in the dark. During these two days, Italians will criss-cross the country (and continents) to go back to their native towns–and you must surely have experienced this–to pay their respects to their dead, to their family and friends. But while there is nothing particularly festive about this time (at least not in this north-eastern part of Italy), it is neither somber. Rather, it is something very intense and, I think, in a profoundly right way.
(viva Abruzzo!:)
October 31st, 2008 at 8:57 pm
While I agree with Fishman, Heidi, and Bruce Roeder, I have to say I’m amazed that no one has commented on what struck me (well, someone sort of referred to it).
Our pagan ancestors were in no way and at no time “happy heathens”!!! Death was a part of their daily lives and, I believe, Halloween was sort of an attempt to “make friends” with the inevitable. Christianity brought them hope–a hope most of them would never have thought of on their own.
Like the poor, beleaguered Evangelicals, I despise Halloween. I don’t decorate, I don’t send out cards or gifts (?), but I do hand out candy to the neighborhood kids….along with Evangelical cartoon-tracts! (Never thought of handing out Saints’ cards! Neat idea!) Having been mildly involved in occultism growing up–and watching my kids, and now my grandkids going through the same curiosity–I have a deep and abiding horror of evil. (And no, I’ve never been attracted to Jehovah’s Witnesses.)
Finally, to Mary Kochan, Thanksgiving is a little different in being an historical “feast” in our own nation. With my grandchildren now being indroctinated in the current hate-America intellectualism, you bet I’m keeping Thanksgiving for what it is….and what it used to be!
October 31st, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I think that the article is actually quite wrong in its analysis and history. As evidenced by the comment from the person from Italy, Halloween, as celebrated in the U.S. and Canada, does not exist in Europe, at least until very recently in a limited way. I have relatives in the Netherlands and friends in the U.K. and it is not celebrated there either. Halloween as we know it is simply NOT European and is not a “holiday” with its roots in pre-Christian Europe. All Saints and All Souls Day are certainly celebrated in Europe, along with the Vespers before hand (as with Easter and Christmas) in anticipation of those feasts. But these celebrations have never had anything to do with ghosts and goblins and darkness. The historical reality is that Halloween as it is celebrated here is an Americanism. I don’t know all the origins and development of how Halloween came to be a celebration on its own as a day of ghosts, witches, devils, and horror. But in that form it is NOT European and NOT Catholic in origin, as evidenced by the fact that it has never been celebrated as such there.
I believe Halloween actually can be traced to the Puritans and Protestants. They do not celebrate All Saints and All Souls. Because those Catholic feasts are so intrinsically associated with indulgences and Purgatory, they were particularly shunned by the Protestants. In fact, that is why Luther nailed up his 95 theses today, as a rejection of these feasts and what they stand for. That is why today is Reformation Day. So, without any concept of the fellowship of the Communion of Saints, the joy of indulgences, and prayer for our beloved dead, the time of year and “festival” turned into a day of death and fear. Historically, witch trials sprouted up in Germany and the English countries only after the Reformation. Why? Perhaps because the peoples of those countries no longer had the sacraments and sacramentals (think St. Benedict medals and holy water) with which to defend themselves against evil spirits. So witchcraft naturally grew up. These are the folks who came over in the Mayflower.
These observations are just based on my knowledge of European history and the fact that Halloween has never been celebrated in Europe. Just some thoughts I had and wanted to share.
October 31st, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Thank you Catherine. It’s always helpful to hear what is going on in Italy from those who are there. I appreciate your response. My husband’s family there doesn’t have a clue about the Halloween we celebrate here and like you mentioned , I am sure they were at the family cemetary lighting candles and laying flowers.
To me it is so sad when our culture ( or that of the Brits) infiltrates a society and they think it is so wonderful. We’ve seen that so much with family there, calling or emailing us with their requests for ” American stuff”. So true about the American TV and film products.
Thanks again for your response.
God bless you!