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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.

MichaelJ 2y ago

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.

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