All Saints’ Day

Today all the saints are celebrated together, including the ones nobody ever canonized and whose names nobody knows. That’s the point of the feast: for every saint on the calendar there are thousands who aren’t. Commemorations of the martyrs began in the fourth century, and the first traces of a general celebration are recorded in Antioch. The practical reason was simple: there were too many martyrs for each one to have a day of their own. In the West the feast was set on November 1 by Gregory III in the eighth century, and Gregory IV extended it to the whole Church in 835. It is a solemnity and a holy day of obligation; before the reforms of Pius XII in 1955 it also had a vigil and an octave. That vigil left a mark no one expected: in English it was called All Hallows’ Eve, and that phrase, worn down over time, gave us Halloween. The Orthodox keep a similar feast on the first Sunday after Pentecost; the Church of Sweden on the Saturday after October 30. In Italy, for centuries, November 1 and 2 have been lived as a single day: people go to the cemetery, bring flowers, and in many places in the South it’s the dead who bring presents to the children. If your name is Santo or Santa, today is your name day — and so is everyone whose name isn’t on the calendar.