Friday, October 31st, 2008
Daily Archive
Word to Life – October 31, 2008
Posted by Fr. Aquinas on 31 Oct 2008 | Tagged as: Word to Life
Today’s was a packed edition of “Word to Life.” We had a lot of material to cover — Halloween, All Saints Day, All Souls Day, and next week’s Election Day. Joining me to help put it all together were Kathryn Lopez, editor of National Review Online, and Fr. Chad Partain, pastor of St. Paul the Apostle Church in Mansura, LA.
A graduate of nearby Dominican Academy and Catholic University in Washington, Kathryn shared with us her thoughts about the upcoming election, as well as her more general insights into how faith and politics can come together in American life. A model she looks to, somewhat naturally considering her job, is William F. Buckley, the recently deceased founder of National Review. Buckley, a Catholic, wrote regularly on faith in the public square, including his famous God and Man at Yale and Nearer, My God. During our conversation, Kathryn was at her best when describing how she grew up Catholic and conservative in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, over at National Review Online, Kathryn had this to say about All Saints Day.
Later in the show, Fr. Partain gave us an update on the shrine he is building to St. Philomena, which he said may be the largest dedicated to her in the United States. He also explained a few of the traditions one can find connected to All Saints and All Souls celebrations in Louisiana, including grave blessings and Masses held in the area’s cemeteries.
Click below for the full audio of today’s show.
All Hallows’ Eve
Posted by Fr. Aquinas on 31 Oct 2008 | Tagged as: Miscellaneous
On this All Hallows’ Eve, I link to two items that might interest you.
First, Fr. Augustine Thompson, OP, gives us a brief history of Halloween in a piece he penned a few years ago entitled “Surprise: Halloween’s Not a Pagan Festival After All.” You can find the article posted here. An excerpt:
It’s true that the ancient Celts of Ireland and Britain celebrated a minor festival on October 31–as they did on the last day of most other months of the year. However, Halloween falls on the last day of October because the Feast of All Saints, or “All Hallows,” falls on November 1. The feast in honor of all the saints in heaven used to be celebrated on May 13, but Pope Gregory III (d. 741) moved it to November 1, the dedication day of All Saints Chapel in St. Peter’s at Rome. Later, in the 840s, Pope Gregory IV commanded that All Saints be observed everywhere. And so the holy day spread to Ireland.
The day before was the feast’s evening vigil, “All Hallows Even,” or “Hallowe’en.” In those days Halloween didn’t have any special significance for Christians or for long-dead Celtic pagans.
In 998, St. Odilo, the abbot of the powerful monastery of Cluny in southern France, added a celebration on November 2. This was a day of prayer for the souls of all the faithful departed. This feast, called All Souls Day, spread from France to the rest of Europe.
So now the Church had feasts for all those in heaven and all those in purgatory. What about those in the other place? It seems Irish Catholic peasants wondered about the unfortunate souls in hell. After all, if the souls in hell are left out when we celebrate those in heaven and purgatory, they might be unhappy enough to cause trouble. So it became customary to bang pots and pans on All Hallows Even to let the damned know they were not forgotten. Thus, in Ireland at least, all the dead came to be remembered–even if the clergy were not terribly sympathetic to Halloween and never allowed All Damned Day into the church calendar.
But that still isn’t our celebration of Halloween. Our traditions on this holiday center on dressing up in fanciful costumes, which isn’t Irish at all. Rather, this custom arose in France during the 14th and 15th centuries. Late medieval Europe was hit by repeated outbreaks of the bubonic plague–the Black Death–and it lost about half its population. It is not surprising that Catholics became more concerned about the afterlife.
Second, Joseph Pearce, author of the celebrated Literary Converts, has edited a new edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Click here for a radio interview Pearce recently gave in which he challenges the contemporary interpretation of the novel. He sees in Shelley’s famous tale a principled rejection of atheistic dogmatism and the unfettered science it tends to advocate. Behind this rejection, Pearce argues, lies Shelley’s defense of tradition and the family.