Every year, November 1st is a lucky day for florists who sell twenty million pots of chrysanthemums in one day, for a turnover of more than 200 million euros. Death not only hangs our loved ones, as in Jacques Brel’s song, but also prepares the recipe. And yet…everyone, or almost, has the wrong day.
Well, the error is only malicious. in fact, the feast of All Saints is inseparable from the day of remembrance of all the faithful departed, November 2, from the Christian liturgy, which established these two feasts. But the confusion nevertheless stems from a misinterpretation… bordering on heresy.
November 1 is the day we celebrate for the Church.”all saints” meaning men and women invited to join God after their death. This holiday perpetuates the veneration of martyrs, which appeared in the early days of Catholicism, but extended it to all people who go to heaven after their death. From the 5th century Rome celebrated it on the Sunday after Pentecost in the spring. The day was then set to May 13, the anniversary of the conversion of the Pantheon, a pagan temple dedicated to all the gods, to a Christian church dedicated to All Saints. Then, in the 8th century, on the occasion of the dedication of the chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica to All Saints of the Church, Pope Gregory III moved All Saints’ Day to November 1, a date that would spread throughout the Church. By Gregory IV in 835. each Christian community has thus far adopted the custom of celebrating saints that pleases itself.
November 1st party… happy!
Thus, All Saints’ Day celebrates not death, but resurrection; it is honoreda huge crowd. not only the saints and blesseds whom we celebrate during the liturgical year, but also the nameless saints whose [Dieu] only knowsPope John Paul II said in 2000. on November 1 in his All Saints Sermon. In its sermon, the Church insists that this holiday be celebrated with the universal vocation of holiness. Christians believe that everyone is called to it. Far from being a day of mourning, the Christian calendar makes November 1 a day of joy and hope. The gospel read that day is what is saidblessingswhich defines virtues and attitudes that believers must adopt to enter God’s eternal joy.
So how did we come to flower gardens every November 1st? This is because the veneration of saints for the church also invites us to pray for the dead who have not yet entered the Kingdom of Heaven. appeared. A 9th-century liturgical text first mentions a special celebration dedicated to them, in addition to the masses celebrated by the families of the deceased for the salvation of their departed loved ones. Then, in the 10th century, the abbot of the powerful abbey of Cluny took up the tradition on his own, before it spread to Rome during the papacy of Leo IX. The feast was finally established in the Roman liturgical calendar from the 13th century.
It is the feast of the Dormition specific to the Roman Church (Armenian Catholics continue to celebrate it, for example, on Easter Monday) that will lead to some symbolic regions of cultural traditions, such as Sicily, where people have been eating for a thousand years. November 1 Frutta di Martorana, a pastry said to have been invented by the sisters of a convent in Palermo. Or Mexico, which parades in macabre costumes on November 2, a custom born in the 19th century that some archaeologists say was inspired by the rituals and costumes of pre-Hispanic civilizations, particularly the Aztec festivals of the dead. .
An ancient Celtic festival… and public holiday
All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day thus form two sides of the same Christian view of life;ifwe were buried with him, that we also might live a new life, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the almighty power of the Father;this is how St. Paul writes (Letter to the Romans, 6, 4). But the confusion between these two holidays may also arise from the zeal with which the Church insisted that All Saints’ Day coincide in its calendar with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, which would be the ancestor of Halloween.
Actually commemorating the dead or possibly invoking dark forces, this festival primarily marks the end of summer (which probably gave it its name, according to Gaelic etymologists). But as with Christmas and the winter solstice, the Church has gradually shaped its liturgical calendar so that “to evangelize» the ancient pagan holidays, one of whose functions was to punctuate the course of seasons and days.
But, let’s be honest, the confusion mainly comes from a practical detail that is not without importance; The holiday of All Saints has long been associated with a public holiday, which was briefly withdrawn after the revolution and then restored by Napoleon. The practice of decorating graves with chrysanthemums, which became popular from the end of the 19th century, was therefore based on this annual holiday; therefore, it is more convenient for the relatives of the deceased to travel to the cemetery where their dead are buried.
Source: Le Figaro
