Halloween actually belongs to an essential component of the Liturgical Year and that is the Sanctoral Cycle. We are used to the movement of time through the various seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Ordinary, Lent, Easter and Pentecost. What we may have neglected is that weaved into the Liturgical Year is the Sanctoral Cycle. At the uppermost, in the celebration of the annual events of Christ's mysteries, we have Mary whom the Church honours with a special love. She is joined by an inseparable bond to the saving work of Christ her Son. As the most excellent fruit of Christ’s redemption, William Wordsworth’s tribute to her, captures it most beautifully. She is “our tainted nature’s solitary boast”. Thus, the Church joyfully contemplates Mary as the faultless image which she, that is the Church, hopes and desires to be.
Apart from venerating the Holy Mother of God, the Church also includes in her annual calendar, days which are devoted to the memories of martyrs and saints. They are raised to the altar of sanctity only by the grace of God and from where they are, they sing God’s perfect praise in heaven. More than that, they offer prayers for us.
Many of us are familiar with the oft-repeated definition of what a Sacrament is and it is helpful to understand why we are celebrating Halloween. What is a Sacrament? Outward sign of inward grace. What does that mean? Firstly, the foundation of our sacramental theology is based on an event. It is the Incarnation. At its most basic, the Incarnation describes the “Word becoming Flesh”. There is a shrine in Italy where if you were there, you should visit. Imagine yourself standing in the Holy House of Loreto as the Angelus bell is rung and the prayer is recited as if for the first time: “Hic Verbum Caro Factum Est”. The scriptural quote is visibly emblazoned on the skirt of the altar. “Here the Word was made Flesh”. That is the bedrock for the Church’s sacramental structure.
In other words, it is because of the Incarnation, that is, God taking on materiality, that we have the Sacraments, meaning that, materiality has the power of conveying the divine. In this vein, a sacrament is a visible reality that hides an invisible truth. Jesus is sometimes described of as the Sacrament of the Father because He said, “to have seen me is to have seen the Father”. In Orthodox iconography, there is no depiction of God the Father because to see Him, Jesus, is to behold the Father. In like manner, the same can be said of the Saints in that “to have seen them is to see Christ”.
“By celebrating the passage of these saints from earth to heaven the Church proclaims the paschal mystery achieved in the saints who have suffered and been glorified with Christ; she proposes them to the faithful as examples drawing all to the Father through Christ, and through their merits she pleads for God's favours”. (Sacramentum concilium 104). In summary, the Church proposes the saints as “sacraments” of Christ.
But what happened?
Firstly, our experience of the saints is fundamentally functional. We barely know our saints except for the “useful” ones. Can you guess the name of the next new parish? Possibly Divine Mercy (granted the title does not belong to a saint) or the saint that is associated with the Divine Mercy. St Faustina. Why? She brings in the pilgrims and the money. It is sounds horribly cynical but our approach to the saints is quite mercenary.
Secondly, perhaps it is not as telling as it is inevitable that we have become mercenary. The onset of the Reformation also kicked in the long process of desacralisation of the Church. It began with the removal of statues of the saints. I entered a former Catholic Church about 40 years ago, now a Calvinist church in Geneva and it was totally bare. I was in York Minster in 2014, now an Anglican Cathedral in the UK. What struck me was the pantheon of saints’ statues, all decapitated. It is ironic that they lopped off the heads of the saints but retained the heads of the monarch. Somehow, they is scant realisation that the retention of the heads of the monarchs contradicts their sanction against idolatry.
Sadly, the march of desacralisation quickened after Vatican II and it matches the pace of “desacramentalisation”. We did away with a lot more of the “material” component of the sacraments and sacramentals preferring a more “spiritual” approach believing that God is more disposed to the interior rather than to the exterior. A glaring example is clothing. In the past, we dressed up appropriately for Mass. Now we hear the usual argument that God does not care what you wear. He is more interested in what is in your heart.
A good development is the recognition that they had been a process of desacralisation because they have brought back the prayer of exorcism in some of the rites. Notably the blessing of water. There was no reference to demonic presence in the post-Vatican II rite. In the restored blessing, exorcism is conducted because of a realisation that Satan’s arena of operation is not restricted to the spiritual realm. To understand this, one must ask the question: What does it mean when we proclaim Jesus as Saviour? From what is He saving us? He is Saviour because there is a possibility that we might go to hell.
Furthermore, in tandem with the desire for ecumenical rapport with our separated brothers and sisters, we tended to “downplay” our “saints” so that we do not appear to be “idolatrous”. This side-lining or emptying of the Church of saints is “disincarnational” and it has a deleterious effect on the life of the Church.
It is true, as St Jerome said, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ”. We accept that the Lord is best known through sacred scripture. However, Pope St Leo in Sermo 74,2 remarked, “What was visible in our Saviour has passed over into His mysteries” meaning that “everything that Jesus did to reconcile us to God, has passed over to the Sacraments”.[1]
We have forgotten that Jesus Christ is also scripted in the Saints. They are lived examples of His teachings. They are the flesh and blood of what it means to be Christ in the world. Perhaps it is much easier when the “outward sign” loses its material basis that our Masses can now be online. We would not have adapted that quickly to “online” Masses if we were not already steeped in a disincarnational spirituality. I am not interested in criticising the popularity of online Masses but note that long before we dove deep into online Masses, we were already swimming in the waters of a disincarnated spirituality. “Halloween” has truly become “Holloween”. When saints are driven out of “All Hallows”, you can understand why it is easy for children to dressed up as devils rather than as saints.
To go deeper into Christ and who He is, we must recover the sense of the Saints. Otherwise, in trying to be faithful to Christ, we have already “emptied” Him of His real content which is visible in the saints we venerate and love. Not just the famous ones but also the unknown ones. Ask any one of our children if they know the life of a saint intimately? St Ignatius of Loyola who recuperating from a cannon ball that shattered his legs were begging for more racy literatures. In the Castle, they only had the Lives of the Saints and the Imitatio Christi. In his recovery, he imagined, “If St Francis of Assisi did this and if St Dominic did that, I can too”. He became a saint because he was inspired by other saints.
What is All Saints’ Day? It is a supposedly a Day of Obligation. But is it still meaningful? At present we designate this day to be a celebration of all the “unknown” saints of the Church. But it may just be a hollow celebration. It makes a lot more sense if we celebrate the “saints” we know so that we can have a day which we celebrate all the saints we do not know.
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[1] The Greek word “mysterion” was translated into Latin as “mysterium” and “sacramentum”.
