October 31st is All Hallows' Eve. The following day is the feast of All Saints, and the one after that is the feast of All Souls. Together, the three days comprehend the Church in its fullness: militant, suffering, and triumphant. There is a spirit of memento mori with a hope of the resurrection and rejoicing in those who have already run their race.
Discussion
Nonsense. It denies the reality of what Halloween actually is in the popular culture and rationalizes complicity with the actual paganism of popular culture. If you deny the evil reality of popular culture then you can rationalize your cowardice in failing to fight it. The article also fails to address the long and varied history of syncretism in Roman Catholicism and the possibility that Roman Catholicism in Ireland adopted certain Celtic or Druidic practices in an effort to be seeker friendly to the local pagans. Putting a holy name on pagan practices does not make the practices holy. Do you really think all the Halloween nonsense you see taking place before your very eyes in the present United States brings glory to God? It does not and Christians should not be accommodating and/or facilitating the glorification and trivialization of evil that celebration of Halloween in the United States in actual fact communicates.
Now you're changing the subject. Your first post was about Halloween which has pagan origins.
Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago, mostly in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1.
This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth.
https://www.history.com/topics/halloween/history-of-halloween
First of all, Halloween is simply another name for All Hallows' Eve, the vigil of All Saints' Day. All Hallows' Eve -> Hallow E'en -> Halloween.
Second, the pop history claim that Samhain is the origin of Halloween is just false. Halloween as we know it today is a result of the American melting pot of various European peoples with their disparate cultures and traditions. I wrote a long-form article explaining the subject, if you're interested.
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Don't B.S. me. You're denying the obvious. The glorifying of witches, demons, and the macbre which is the reality of the celebration of Halloween in the United States, along with it's association with such things as slasher movies, communicates absolutely nothing about virtuous deeds of saints. I'm not surprised by the existence of Roman Catholic propaganda seeking to justify it. The history of Roman Catholicism has included syncretism from the beginning. Statues of Roman idols were converted to idols of Mary and Joseph and various Apostles and Martyrs. It doesn't surprise me that Irish Catholics would practice syncretism with the pagan practices that previously existed in Ireland.
I think those who seek to use Halloween to glorify evil are co-opting a Christian holiday to try to justify some sort of neo-paganism. Evil cannot create, it can only corrupt. Halloween only makes sense in the light of All Hallows' the day after, but our commercialized vision of the day eliminates all of that entirely.
The main point I want to get across is that it's quite all right for Christian parents to send their kids out trick-or-treating, so long as the festivities are kept in their proper context of All Saints' and All Souls' Days. If you don't want to celebrate Halloween, that's quite alright, but there's no need to cede the vigil of one of the high feast days of the year to neo-paganism just because our consumer culture focuses on the wrong parts.
On a slightly different note, the common depictions of the devil with red skin, a pointy tail, and a pitchfork are intended to mock him. Such costumes were used in Medieval passion plays, and the imagery even appears in some quite humorous passages of Dante's Inferno. I suspect this tradition is another contributor to Halloween customs.
https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/satan-proud-and-powerful
Halloween is not catholic stuff. In Brazil as a child, I did not even know it existed. It has nothing to do with All Saints' day.
Only as a teenager reading Peanuts I learned from Charlie Brown that in USA there was some kind of witch-festival with candies.
HW is anglo-german stuff. "Witch culture" is stronger on protestant lands, because superstitions and accusations could grown into mass histeria (Salem, etc). I remember being amazed how americans could be so primitive as to be witch-hunting in the 1690's. If some woman were accused of witchcraft in catholic lands the church would investigate with strong cepticism, and calumny was a grave crime everywhere.
witches flying in brooms were not in our imagination until we got american cartoons, much less salem-level stuff.
That said... we repeat the pagan god's names when we name weekdays. We learn mithology, read Homer, docs use esculapius rod, etc.
if nobody takes the witch-pagan stuff seriously... why HW would be different? We lose so much time idolizing sportsmen or Batman, why not witches or ghosts?
'wrong' is when real satanists exploit it to their ends.
or when HW occupies so much mental time that people forget All Saints Day, or All Souls Day.
But halloween is not the only secular feast pushing religious ones out of our minds, every decade there is another woke-festival worse that the previous one.
Just because something is not associated with Roman Catholicism in some part of the globe does not mean it's not associated with Roman Catholicism in another part of the globe. Syncretism usually accommodates the local variety of paganism. In Ireland that would be druids.
I don't see why adopting local cultural forms is such a bad thing. When peoples join the universal Church, they bring their culture with them. Historically, this often added a local flavor to preexisting Catholic feasts
Local culture can contaminate. I prefer the pure to the profane. Separation and purity are integral to the concepts of holiness, sanctification, and sainthood.
The New Testament was written in a specific time and place in history, namely, amidst a Jewish and pagan milieu in a corner of the Roman Empire. The writers were influenced by the cultural practice of their time, and Scripture itself is full of cultural references that don't apply directly to the present day.
Tell me where you are finding the pure, unadulterated cultural practice of Christianity.
Halloween is not associated with Catholics. Its modern form started in protestant US.
And the whole 'witch folklore' would be forgotten in catholic lands if not from protestantism - witch-hunt histerics flourished in anglo-german protestant lands and kept the associated folcklore alive.
Even the date is wrong, it would make more sense in the catholic calendar to associate it with Nov2 (The day of the dead in purgatory, like in mexico), than with Nov 1st, the day of all saints in heaven.
Here in Brazil, it is only big with protestants (like luterans/calvinists, not like pentecostals) who pushed for it, helped by american media/movies/etc. Today more schools do HW trick-or-treat (children like candies), but it is quite recent. Secular/woke/commies see it as another woke-festival.