Education in Faith News 

ALL SAINTS DAY/HALLOWEEN 

What is All Saints’ Day?

All Saints’ Day (or All Hallows’ Day) is a major feast day on the Catholic Church’s calendar.

We celebrate All Saints’ Day on November 1, the day after Halloween or All Hallows’ Eve. On this day we honor not only the saints we know by name in Heaven, but also any saints whose names we don’t know! This is the time of year when the living honor all the dead: the saints already in Heaven and all the holy souls stuck in purgatory on their way to Heaven.

There are so many saints in Heaven who don’t have an official feast day, but are still special nontheless! All Saints’ Day is a day dedicated to them.

All Hallows’ Eve

The day before All Saints’ Day is Halloween.  Is there a connection between these two celebrations?  Actually, there is but the religious origins of Halloween have largely been forgotten.  Halloween is derived from Hallows’ Eve or Hallowmas, which means The Eve of All Saints.  Vigils begin the night before Sundays and major feasts.  The modern term of Halloween was derived from a way of saying All Saints Eve – just as we say Christmas Eve.  In the later half of the nineteenth century, Halloween became known as a more secular holiday and began to develop into what it is today.

Halloween is called that because it is the vigil of the feast of All Saints or “All Hallows.” But that feast was not founded to accommodate British Celts; it was founded for Roman Christians. The problem was Italian logistics, not “How do we get the Druids on board?” The Church by the seventh century was swimming in martyrs and saints, popular in various locales. If we celebrated all their feast days, nobody would get any work done. Solution: have a feast to celebrate all the saints popular in different Italian towns and villages all at once.

https://catechistcafe.weebly.com/fall-halloween-all-saints.html 

Weekday Class Mass Timetable 

Community Mass and Timetable Term 4

Dara Blake 

Religious Education Leader