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Tag Archives: All Saints


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All Saints Day | We celebrate the Eve of All Hallows!

St Ignatius Loyola being welcomed into heaven by Christ, detail of nave ceiling fresco by Andrea Pozzo, c. 1685, Chiesa di Sant'Ignazio di Loyola in Campo Marzio, Rome.

St Ignatius Loyola being welcomed into heaven by Christ, detail of nave ceiling fresco by Andrea Pozzo, c. 1685, Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola in Campo Marzio, Rome.

Join us for our Halloween supper after Mass tonight!   Some Christians have a problem celebrating Halloween, thinking it gives too much glory to Satan, death and evil itself.  Actually Halloween was originally a celebration leading up to the greater feast of All Saints or All Hallows (1 November), the purpose of which is to celebrate those Saints who are with Christ in glory because of his victory over sin, death and the devil.

From Fr Steve Grunow:

There is a lot that is unsavory about the contemporary celebration of Halloween. What does the singular focus on violence, horror and death have to say about our culture? The traditional, Catholic Halloween placed these realities within the context of Christ’s victory over sin, death and the devil. The current secularized version of the festival has no salvific content and has been loosed from its theological moorings. It looks very much like a festival of death for a culture of death and for that reason I can see why parents might be concerned.

But what is the proper response to a culture of death? To lock the Church behind closed doors or to let her out into the world? I think it is time for Catholics to accept the religious liberties that this culture claims to afford them and go public with their own festivals- and to do so dramatically and with a great deal of public fervor. What is holding us back? What are we afraid will happen? The reticence and fear that characterizes Catholics is costing the Church its unique culture and it is allowing the culture of death to flourish.  Halloween should not be a day when our churches go dark and Christians retreat into the shadows, but when we fill the darkness with Christ’s light and go out into the culture, inviting everyone to the prepare for the festival of the Saints with all the joy we can muster.

Read the rest here.

For a great scripture study on today’s readings, try The Sacred Page.  And listen to Bishop Robert Barron’s homily, What Does it Mean to be a Saint?

Today’s Mass Readings:

Word format: All Saints 2015

Pdf format:All Saints 2015

 


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All Saints and All Souls

An angel frees the souls from Purgatory (detail), Ludovico Caracci, 1610, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Vaticana

An angel frees the souls from Purgatory (detail), Ludovico Caracci,
1610, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Vaticana

The Solemnities of All Saints (1 Nov) and All Souls (2 Nov)  are particularly poignant to me this year.

I lost my husband to cancer in March, and I remember thinking, as I said goodbye to his body, that Chemistry and Biology could only go a certain way to explaining what had happened.  The essence of Bill, his irrepressible cheerfulness and zest for life, his forgetfulness of self, his ridiculous jokes, his kindness and generosity, the way he would give a chirpy greeting to everyone he passed – in short, those elements which made up his transcendent soul – had moved on, and all that was left behind was merely a shell.

As Fr Barron says in his homily,

We are more than our bodies, more than our memories, more than our imagination, more than our senses.  There is a mysterious spiritual capacity within us.  That’s what the church calls the soul.

 

Click here to listen:Click-here-to-listen

Fr Barron also has a beautiful take on All Saints’ Day here:

The takeaway message is that once you surrender your life to Christ, you find your deepest self.  The saints are those people who have surrendered their lives to God so completely, that they have lit up the world around them with God’s love.  Yes, the saints are heroes and role models but they are also still alive, and they are our spiritual friends – and we can ask them to pray for us and act on our behalf (think of St Therese of Lisieux – ‘I will spend my heaven doing good upon earth.’)

Here are this Sunday’s readings for Australia.

Word format: All Souls Day Year A

Pdf format: All Souls Day Year A

Don’t forget Fr Augustine will join with other Northern suburbs’ priests to celebrate Mass for All Souls at the Chapel at Pinnaroo Memorial Park, Whitfords Avenue on 2 November at 2.30 p.m.  We particularly remember our former parishioner, Veronica (Ronnie) Spratling, who died on 29 October in Victoria.  Our condolences to all the Spratling family.

I have also written a list of deceased members of our parish in the intentions section of the Newsletter. If I have left anyone out, please email me and I will add them to our November list.