Halloween is, as Flora Watkins observes in this issue, oddly contentious for some Catholics. Granted, the festivities have come a long way from the old traditions for the season which some readers may remember growing up with in Ireland or Scotland. It is sad to see a festivity which featured bobbing for apples, harmless fortune-telling – the ring to be found in a Halloween cake, or barmbrack foretold who would be the first to marry – and children dressing up as ghosts turning into a celebration of horror movies and an orgy of chocolate consumption. This is not the simple festival of mild misrule it once was; after being taken by Irish emigrants to the United States, it has been commercialised beyond recognition.
But to see Halloween as sinister is to misunderstand it. The event is, as the name tells us, the vigil, or eve, of All Saints’ Day and it looks forward also to All Souls’ Day; it also includes, in typical Catholic fashion, elements of an earlier Irish pagan festivity. It is unsurprising, then, that it should feature ghosts. So long as we remember that the ghosts refer to the souls of the faithful departed whom we remember soon after, we shall not go very far wrong. It seems puritanical to attempt to censor a festivity that anticipates a holy day. Rather, we should try to remind others of its place in the Christian calendar.
It has also in Britain tended to displace Guy Fawkes’s Night, and few Catholics can take much pleasure in celebrating the horrible death of a man who died for the defence of the Catholic faith. Good riddance to the Guy. Halloween, for all its excesses, is at least preferable to that vindictive festivity. But please let’s not wish each other Happy Halloween; that really is a misunderstanding of the whole thing.
<strong><strong>This article appears in the September 2024 edition of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
