In Festo Omnium Sanctorum — on the first day of November, I classis
Te gloriosus Apostolorum chorus, te Prophetarum laudabilis numerus, te Martyrum candidatus laudat exercitus. “The glorious choir of the Apostles, the admirable company of the Prophets, the white-robed army of Martyrs, praise Thee.” — Te Deum
I. A feast without a single subject
Every other day of the Sanctorale has a name attached to it. Today has none, or rather it has all of them. The Church does not honour one Apostle, one martyr, one virgin or one doctor, but the whole number of those who have reached the end of the road and now see God. Most of them she cannot name. The feast of All Saints is the day on which the Church confesses that her calendar, however crowded, is only the visible edge of something much larger.
This hagiography therefore cannot follow a life from birth to death. Its subject is the saints as such: who they are, what Scripture says of them, what the Church teaches about their state and their prayer, how she came to recognise some of them by name, and how she came to keep one day for them all. As in every entry, what Scripture and the Church’s solemn teaching affirm is kept distinct from what is reliably reported, and both from what pious tradition has handed down.
II. Who are the saints?
The Latin sanctus, like the Greek hagios, means holy: set apart for God and belonging to Him. In the New Testament the word is used of all the baptised. St. Paul writes “to the church of God that is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints” (1 Cor. 1:2), and he sends greetings from “all the saints” in Rome and in Caesar’s household (Phil. 4:22). Every Christian was made holy at the font, marked as God’s own, and called to become in fact what he already is by grace. “Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48).
In the narrower sense the Church uses today, a saint is one who has finished the course and been received into glory. The Church distinguishes three conditions of the one Body of Christ. The Church Militant is still on earth, fighting the good fight. The Church Suffering is in Purgatory, being made ready for the vision of God; she will be remembered tomorrow. The Church Triumphant is in heaven, and she is remembered today. The Catechism of the Council of Trent, explaining the article sanctorum communionem in the Creed, teaches that these are not three Churches but one, joined by one Head, one Spirit, and a sharing of goods among all its members.
So the saints of this feast are not a different kind of Christian. They are Christians who have arrived. Every one of them began where we are, with the same sacraments, the same commandments, the same temptations and the same grace.
III. The testimony of Scripture
They are alive. When the Sadducees denied the resurrection, Our Lord answered them from the burning bush: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matt. 22:32). The patriarchs, long buried, were living to God. The Book of Wisdom says of the just man whom the wicked despised: “Behold how they are numbered among the children of God, and their lot is among the saints” (Wis. 5:5).
They pray for us. Before his victory over Nicanor, Judas Machabeus saw in a dream the dead high priest Onias praying for the Jewish people, and then the prophet Jeremias, of whom Onias said: “This is a lover of his brethren, and of the people of Israel: this is he that prayeth much for the people, and for all the holy city, Jeremias the prophet of God” (2 Mach. 15:12-14). In the Apocalypse, the four and twenty ancients fall down before the Lamb holding “golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints” (Apoc. 5:8), and an angel offers incense at the golden altar “of the prayers of all saints” before the throne (Apoc. 8:3-4).
They watch the race. The Epistle to the Hebrews, having listed the heroes of faith from Abel to the Machabees, turns to its readers: Ideoque et nos tantam habentes impositam nubem testium. “And therefore we also having so great a cloud of witnesses over our head, laying aside every weight and sin which surrounds us, let us run by patience to the fight proposed to us: looking on Jesus, the author and finisher of faith” (Heb. 12:1-2). The image is of a stadium. The saints fill the stands; we are on the track; and all eyes, theirs and ours, are on Christ who ran first.
They are beyond counting. St. John first hears the number of the sealed, a hundred and forty-four thousand, and then sees “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and tribes, and peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne” (Apoc. 7:9). That verse, read in today’s Epistle, is the charter of the feast.
IV. What the Church teaches about them
They see God. In 1336 Pope Benedict XII defined, in the constitution Benedictus Deus, that the souls of the saints, once purified, see the divine essence by an intuitive vision, face to face, without any creature coming between, and that they do so now, before the resurrection of the body (Denzinger 1000-1002). This is the heart of their glory. They are not resting in a pleasant waiting-room. They possess God.
They are to be honoured. The Church distinguishes the worship given to God alone, latria, from the honour given to the saints as His friends and servants, dulia, and the higher honour given to the Mother of God, hyperdulia. St. Thomas treats dulia as a virtue joined to justice, by which we render to excellent persons the reverence their excellence deserves (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 103). St. Augustine had already put the point plainly against the Manichee Faustus: Christians honour the martyrs with love and fellowship, but they build no altars to the martyrs; they offer the sacrifice to God alone, at the martyrs’ tombs, in thanksgiving for their victory (Contra Faustum XX.21).
They are to be invoked. The Council of Trent, in its final session in 1563, taught that the saints reigning with Christ offer their prayers to God for men; that it is good and useful to call upon them humbly and to have recourse to their prayers and help in obtaining favours from God through His Son Jesus Christ, who alone is our Redeemer and Saviour; and that those who deny this think impiously (Sess. XXV, decree on the invocation and veneration of saints). Christ remains the one Mediator. The saints do not add to His mediation; they share in it, as members of His Body pray for one another.
Their merits are His gifts. The Collect of the day speaks of venerating the merits of all the saints. The word can trouble those who hear in it a claim that the saints earned heaven by their own power. The Church has always answered with St. Augustine that when God crowns our merits He crowns His own gifts. The saints’ merits are real, because their wills truly cooperated with grace; and they are wholly grace, because nothing in them that pleases God came from anywhere else. The multitude in the Apocalypse sings Salus Deo nostro… et Agno, “Salvation to our God, and to the Lamb.” They are the first to give the credit away.
V. Known and unknown
For the first Christian centuries, the saints honoured by name were almost all martyrs. A martyr’s death was public, and the local church that witnessed it kept its anniversary. The Martyrdom of Polycarp, written by the church of Smyrna shortly after the bishop was burned in the mid-second century, is the earliest witness. The Smyrnaeans say that they gathered his bones, more precious than jewels, laid them in a fitting place, and meant to assemble there each year to keep the birthday of his martyrdom, both in memory of those who had already fought and to train those who would. They add a careful distinction: Christ they worship as the Son of God, while the martyrs they love as disciples and imitators of the Lord (Mart. Pol. 17-18).
After the persecutions ended, the Church began to honour confessors who had not shed their blood: ascetics like St. Anthony, bishops like St. Martin of Tours, virgins and doctors. For centuries a saint’s cult arose from below, from the people and the local bishop, and was ratified by translation of the relics to an altar. As abuses crept in, the Holy See gradually took the judgment to itself. The first papal canonization that survives in a documentary record is that of St. Ulrich of Augsburg by Pope John XV in 993. Pope Alexander III in the twelfth century insisted that no one be venerated publicly as a saint without the authority of the Roman Church, and his ruling entered the Church’s law under Gregory IX. Urban VIII in the seventeenth century fixed the modern procedure, and Pope Benedict XIV, before his election, wrote the great treatise on beatification and canonization that guided the process for two centuries.
That history gives the feast its point. The canonized saints are those whose holiness the Church has examined and solemnly declared. They are a tiny fraction of the saved. The rest are known to God alone: the faithful wife, the patient labourer, the child who died in baptismal innocence, the soul who passed through Purgatory unnoticed by anyone on earth and is now before the throne. The Church cannot give them their own days, so she gives them this one. The Collect asks God to grant us the abundance of His mercy multiplicatis intercessoribus, with intercessors multiplied. Today the number is as large as it can be.
VI. How the feast came to be
The East first. By the fourth century the Churches of the East kept a common feast of all the martyrs. St. Ephrem in Syria knew such a day in the spring. St. John Chrysostom preached at Antioch a sermon in praise of all the martyrs of the whole world, on the Sunday after Pentecost. The Byzantine Churches keep their Sunday of All Saints on that day still.
The Pantheon. In Rome the decisive event came in the first decade of the seventh century. The Liber Pontificalis records that Pope St. Boniface IV obtained from the Emperor Phocas the Pantheon, the great temple of all the gods, and dedicated it to the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the Martyrs. It was the first pagan temple in Rome to be turned into a church. The dedication is commonly dated to 13 May 609, and the anniversary was kept on that day. St. Bede, in his chronicle, says that the Pope did it so that the memory of all the saints might be honoured in the place which had once been given to the worship not of gods but of demons. A later account, not in the Liber Pontificalis, says that twenty-eight cartloads of martyrs’ bones were brought from the catacombs and laid beneath the altar. Roman popular legend adds that when the Pope consecrated the building the demons fled through the open eye of the dome. The dedication is Tier 1 history; the cartloads are strongly attested tradition; the fleeing demons are pious legend.
St. Peter’s and 1 November. Pope St. Gregory III, in the 730s, built an oratory in old St. Peter’s to house relics of the Apostles and of all the holy martyrs and confessors, as the Liber Pontificalis records. He did this in the midst of the Iconoclast crisis, when the Byzantine emperor was attacking the veneration of images and relics, and the oratory stood as Rome’s answer. Tradition links the dedication of this oratory with 1 November, and the Roman observance of All Saints on that date is generally traced to it.
The whole West. A century later, according to the chronicle of Sigebert of Gembloux, the Emperor Louis the Pious in 835, at the suggestion of Pope Gregory IV and with the agreement of the bishops, ordered the feast of All Saints to be kept on the Kalends of November throughout Gaul and Germany. From the Carolingian realm it spread through the whole Latin Church. Some historians have argued for an Irish or Anglo-Saxon origin of the November date, and the question remains open; the Roman and Frankish line is the best attested.
Vigil and octave. The medieval Church surrounded the feast with a fasting vigil on 31 October and an octave running to 8 November, the octave commonly ascribed to Pope Sixtus IV in the fifteenth century. During the octave the Mass Gaudeamus was repeated in white vestments, and the black Mass of All Souls on 2 November stood within it, mourning inside joy. The English name of the vigil, All Hallows’ Eve, survives in a secular form that has largely forgotten its meaning. In 1955 the decree Cum nostra hac aetate of Pope Pius XII suppressed both the vigil and the octave, along with most others, and the 1962 Missal therefore keeps All Saints as a single day of the first class, followed directly by All Souls.
VII. The Fathers on the saints
St. Cyprian wrote his treatise On Mortality during the plague that swept Carthage in the 250s, when Christians were dying in great numbers and some were afraid. He told them to look at death differently. We are strangers here, he wrote; our country is paradise, and the patriarchs are our fathers. A great number of those dear to us await us there: parents, brothers, children, already safe and anxious now only for our salvation. There is the glorious choir of the Apostles, the company of the exulting prophets, the countless multitude of martyrs crowned for their victory, the virgins who conquered the flesh, the merciful who fed the poor. To these, he urged, let us hasten with eager desire (De mortalitate 26). The passage reads almost as a sermon for this feast written thirteen centuries before it was universal.
St. Jerome defended the veneration of the saints against the priest Vigilantius, who mocked the honour paid to relics and denied that the saints could pray for the living. Jerome answered that if the Apostles and martyrs could pray for others while still in the body, when they had to be anxious for themselves, how much more after their crowns and victories. The Lamb, he reminded him, is followed by the saints wherever He goes (Apoc. 14:4); they are not shut up in some place apart (Contra Vigilantium 6).
St. Bede, or a preacher writing under his name, gave the Church the sermon long read in the Roman Breviary on this feast. He calls the Church a mother made glorious by the honour God has paid to her children, crowned with roses and lilies: the roses of the martyrs, red with their blood, and the lilies of the virgins, white with their purity. And he adds the line that keeps the feast from becoming a spectacle for others: let us strive to reach that country ourselves, where all these await us.
St. Bernard, preaching on this day, confessed that the saints have no need of our honours. What could our praise add to those who already possess God? But the memory of them, he said, sets a great longing alight in us: the desire to share their company and the desire that Christ, our life, may appear to us as He appears to them (Sermo 2 in festo omnium sanctorum). That is the right use of the feast. We do not honour the saints to flatter them. We honour them so that we will want to go where they are.
VIII. What the feast teaches
That holiness is the ordinary goal. The multitude no man can number is the plainest refutation of the idea that sanctity is for a few heroic souls. The calendar shows us the famous saints so that we can learn from them. This feast shows us the unfamous ones so that we stop excusing ourselves.
That the Church is one family across death. We do not lose the saints when they die, and they do not lose us. They pray for us; we honour them and ask their help; and with the souls in Purgatory, whom we will remember tomorrow, all three conditions of the Church are bound together in charity. Death divides the Body’s members only in their state, not in their love.
That honour paid to the saints is honour paid to God. The Pantheon was turned from the worship of many false gods to the honour of the one true God’s servants. The saints are not rivals to God. They are His masterpieces, and praising a masterpiece praises the artist.
That the end of the story is joy. The Introit begins Gaudeamus. Between the Kingship of Christ and the mourning of All Souls, the Church sets a day of unmixed rejoicing. She wants her children to know, before November turns their thoughts to death and judgment, where the road leads for those who persevere.
Practice
Examine. Do I think of sainthood as something for others, never really for me? Do I ask the saints for help, or have I let devotion to them lapse into a few habits? Is there a saint whose example rebukes a particular sin of mine, whose life I have avoided reading for that reason? Have I prayed for my own dead, and do I live as one who hopes to see them again?
Do. Pray the Litany of the Saints slowly today. At the end, add the names of your baptismal and Confirmation patrons, and of any holy dead you have known. Choose one saint you know little about, and read his or her life this week. Begin tomorrow the work of the Holy Souls: a visit to a cemetery, a Mass offered, the indulgences of the first eight days of November sought under the usual conditions.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui nos omnium Sanctorum tuorum merita sub una tribuisti celebritate venerari: quæsumus; ut desideratam nobis tuæ propitiationis abundantiam, multiplicatis intercessoribus, largiaris. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“Almighty and everlasting God, who hast granted us to venerate the merits of all Thy saints in one solemnity: we beseech Thee, that, as our intercessors are multiplied, Thou wouldst bestow upon us the desired abundance of Thy propitiation. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
Aspiration. Omnes Sancti et Sanctæ Dei, intercedite pro nobis. “All ye holy men and women of God, intercede for us.”
Devote. It is Sunday, and the first day of the month of the Holy Souls. Pray the Glorious Mysteries, resting on the fifth, the Coronation of Our Lady as Queen of All Saints. Read St. Cyprian’s passage on our true country, or the seventh chapter of the Apocalypse, before you sleep.
If you wish to go deeper: the Theology and Doctrine path takes up the communion of saints, the beatific vision as defined in Benedictus Deus, the distinction of latria, dulia and hyperdulia, and the theology of merit as God’s gift. The Church History path follows the cult of the martyrs from Smyrna to the Pantheon, the Iconoclast crisis behind Gregory III’s oratory, the Carolingian spread of the feast, and the development of papal canonization. The Sacred Liturgy path studies the pre-1955 vigil and octave of All Saints and their suppression. The East-West thread compares the Roman feast of 1 November with the Byzantine Sunday of All Saints after Pentecost. The Lives of the Saints path continues tomorrow’s turn from the Church Triumphant to the Church Suffering.
Regina Sanctorum omnium, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; the Martyrdom of Polycarp 17-18; St. Cyprian, De mortalitate 26; St. Jerome, Contra Vigilantium*; St. Augustine,* Contra Faustum XX.21; St. John Chrysostom, Laudatio sanctorum omnium qui martyrium toto orbe passi sunt*; St. Bede,* Chronica maiora*, and the sermon for this feast attributed to him in the Roman Breviary; St. Bernard,* Sermo 2 in festo omnium sanctorum*; St. Thomas Aquinas,* Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 103; the Liber Pontificalis*; Sigebert of Gembloux,* Chronographia*, s.a. 835; Benedict XII,* Benedictus Deus (1336); the Council of Trent, Session XXV (1563); the Catechism of the Council of Trent*, on the ninth article of the Creed; Pius XII,* Cum nostra hac aetate (1955); the Roman Martyrology; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907-1912), s.vv. “All Saints,” “Pope St. Boniface IV,” “Pope Gregory IV,” and “Beatification and Canonization”; Butler’s Lives of the Saints*. The Fathers are given in paraphrase. Details of the Pantheon dedication beyond the* Liber Pontificalis*, and the link between Gregory III’s oratory and 1 November, are given as tradition.*