The Church Triumphant — The Great Multitude, The Household of the Redeemed, The Cloud of Witnesses (609–835)
"A great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and tribes, and peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne, and in sight of the Lamb." — Revelation 7:9
Feast Day: November 1 Dedicated in Rome: May 13, 609 — Pope Boniface IV Fixed on November 1: Eighth century — Pope Gregory III Extended to the Whole Church: Around 835 — Pope Gregory IV Rank: Solemnity (Holy Day of Obligation in the Latin Church; check your local bishops' conference) Order / Vocation: The universal call to holiness — the Church in glory Patron of: The unnamed holy · Those whose saints have no feast day · The hidden faithful of every nation · Every Christian called to sainthood
So it is easy to decide that holiness belongs to other people, the ones in the stained glass. We admire them from the pew and go home.
The feast of All Saints will not let us off that easily. It is the one day the Church stops naming individuals and looks at the whole crowd at once. The canonized are in it, but so are the thousands with no feast day at all: the soldier who refused to burn incense to the emperor, the widow who said her rosary in a village nobody wrote down, the child baptized and dead within the week. Heaven, the Church says, is not a small gallery of spiritual champions. It is a household, and it is much bigger than anyone has counted.
If you have buried someone you loved, the feast has something for you as well. Some of the people you have lost may already be in that crowd. The Church prays for the rest tomorrow, on All Souls. And there is room in it for you.
A Church That Kept Count of Its Dead
The first Christians did something their neighbors found strange. When a martyr was killed, they did not just grieve. They took the body, buried it, and came back on the anniversary to celebrate Mass at the grave. They called that day the saint's birthday, because it was the day the saint was born into the presence of God.
The people of Smyrna did this for their bishop Polycarp, who was burned and then stabbed in the middle of the second century. They gathered his bones, which they valued above gold and jewels, and laid them where they could meet each year. They did not think they were starting a custom. They were doing what you do for someone you love.
Then came the arithmetic problem. Under the emperor Diocletian, in the early fourth century, the killing was so widespread that the calendar ran out of room. Some martyrs were known only to the family that buried them. Some were never identified. So churches began setting aside one day for all the martyrs together. John Chrysostom preached on such a day in Antioch in the fourth century, and the Churches of the East still keep a feast of all the saints on the Sunday after Pentecost.
The feast did not begin as a neat idea about holiness. It began because the Church could not bear to forget people whose names it had lost.
Who Counts as a Saint Now?
When the persecutions ended, the question changed. After Constantine's peace in the early fourth century, you no longer reached the altar by way of the arena. So who was a saint?
The Church answered slowly. The confessors, who had been tortured and survived, were honored. So were bishops who held their flocks together through the storm, hermits who walked into the desert, consecrated virgins, and teachers who defended the faith against heresy. Martyrdom of blood was joined by the martyrdom of a whole life.
There was a hard side to this as well. In the persecutions many Christians had broken. Some had burned the incense. Some had paid for forged certificates saying they had. Some had handed over the sacred books. When the danger passed they wanted to come back, and the Church had to decide whether it was a company of the unbroken or a home for the forgiven. It chose to be a home, and it did so with Peter in mind, who swore three times that he did not know the Lord and was still given the keys.
That is part of what November 1 means. Not everyone in the crowd got there with a clean record. A good many nearly did not get there at all.
The Temple That Was Emptied
In Rome there was a building that had been the pride of the old pagan city. The Pantheon, rebuilt under Hadrian, is a great round temple with an opening in the center of the dome, so a column of light slides across the floor as the day goes on. It had been built for all the gods.
On May 13 in the year 609 (some reckon it 610), Pope Boniface IV took the building from the emperor Phocas and did something nobody in Rome had expected. He had the idols cleared out and consecrated the place to the Blessed Virgin and all the martyrs. An old tradition says the relics came in by the wagonload from the catacombs, twenty-eight carts of them. A temple built for gods who did not exist was given to men and women who had really lived and really died for Christ.
Think about what that meant to a Roman standing in the square. The glory of the city was being handed over to the people buried outside its walls.
The church is still there, under the name Saint Mary and the Martyrs, and the dome is still open to the sky.
From Honoring the Dead to Belonging to Them
At some point the Church had to move from admiring the saints to understanding them as family. This is the center of the feast, and it is a matter of faith more than history.
The Church teaches that all Christians belong to one body. Some are still on the road, some are being purified after death, and some are already with God in glory. Death does not break the bond between them. The saints in heaven pray for us. We pray for the souls being purified. All of it runs through Christ, the one Mediator, who is not pushed aside by his saints but honored in them.
The Second Vatican Council pressed this teaching home to ordinary believers. Every Christian, in every state of life, is called to the fullness of holiness. A saint is not a different kind of creature. A saint is a Christian who let grace finish the work it started.
Most of us push back here, and the feast does not pretend otherwise. It is far easier to admire a saint than to believe we are meant to become one. The Gospel read on November 1 is the Beatitudes, and it gives no one an easy way out. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek, the merciful, the clean of heart, the peacemakers, and the ones persecuted for doing what is right. Anyone who has tried to live even one of those for a week knows what it costs. The Church reads that passage on the day it honors the saints because that is what they looked like. Yours can look like that too.
What the Feast Left Behind
Gregory III, who was pope from 731 to 741, gave the feast a second home. He dedicated a chapel in Saint Peter's to the Savior, his Mother, the apostles, the martyrs, the confessors, and all the just and perfect at rest throughout the world. The anniversary of that chapel was fixed on November 1.
Around 835 Pope Gregory IV is recorded as extending the observance to the whole Church. From there it spread across the West and settled into the form we know: a vigil on the evening of October 31, which is where the name All Hallows' Eve comes from, and a Mass the next morning with readings from Revelation, the First Letter of John, and the Beatitudes. The Church sings the Litany of the Saints and asks them, one by one, to pray for us.
The feast gave rise to another. In 998, Odilo, abbot of Cluny, told the monks of his monasteries to remember all the faithful departed on the day after All Saints. The wider Church took it up, and it became All Souls on November 2. The two days go together. On the first, the Church looks up at those who have arrived. On the second, it kneels for those still on the way.
And there are smaller things. It is why Catholics give saints' names at baptism, dedicate churches to saints, and keep their pictures in the house. It is why a parish is never only the people who happen to be alive in it.
The Voices That Said No
Honor given to the saints has never gone unchallenged, and the first serious attack came from inside the Christian world.
In the eighth century the emperor in Constantinople turned against holy images and ordered them removed from the churches. Soldiers scraped icons off walls. People who defended them were beaten, exiled, and sometimes killed. The campaign struck at the veneration of saints, because the image was one of the ways ordinary people prayed with them. Gregory III answered from Rome by condemning the destruction of images at a synod in 731, in the same years he dedicated the chapel in Saint Peter's. The Church settled the matter at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. Honor shown to an image, it taught, passes to the person the image represents.
Abuses also grew up within the Church's own devotion. In the Middle Ages some practices around relics went beyond what the faith allows, and the Council of Trent dealt with them in the sixteenth century. It corrected the abuses and kept the doctrine whole, defending the invocation of the saints and the veneration of relics and images.
There is a quieter problem now, and it is probably the more common one: sentimentality. The saints get turned into plaster figures with tilted heads and blank eyes, people who never had a bad morning. Anyone who reads their lives knows that is false. They argued, doubted, lost their tempers, and fought the same sins we do. What made them saints was that they kept turning back to God. Revelation describes the multitude as those who have come through great tribulation. They did not skip it.
The Passage
Every saint's death is different, and the feast gathers them all.
Polycarp was eighty-six when he was brought before the Roman proconsul. The proconsul offered him a way out. Swear by the emperor, curse Christ, and go home. Polycarp answered that he had served Christ for eighty-six years and had never been wronged by him, so how could he blaspheme his King and Savior now? They tied him to the stake, and he prayed aloud, thanking God that he had been counted worthy to share the cup of Christ's martyrs.
Monica, the mother of Augustine, died quietly at the port of Ostia, far from the home she had meant to return to. She told her sons not to fret about where her body was laid. All she asked was that they remember her at the altar of the Lord. She had prayed for years over a son who seemed lost, and she lived long enough to see him baptized.
Then there are the ones nobody recorded. They died in prison cells, plague wards, kitchens, hospital beds, labor camps, and on battlefields, holding a rosary or only the half-remembered words of a prayer. The feast of All Saints is the Church's way of saying that every one of those deaths was seen.
That is the hope underneath all of it. The First Letter of John, read on the feast, says that we are God's children now, that what we shall be has not yet appeared, and that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. That is what the saints have. They see him. The Church keeps this feast because it believes this is where the story ends for those who love God, and that our story can end the same way.
Whom the Feast Looks After
The Church has not named a formal patron for All Saints, but the feast carries a patronage in the traditional sense. Each part of it has a reason.
The unnamed holy. Most of the saints in heaven will never appear on a calendar. They were never investigated, never canonized, and never prayed to by name. The Church knows that canonization declares something already true and does not create it. This feast belongs to the ones nobody declared.
Those whose saints have no feast day. Plenty of believers carry a name that no calendar celebrates, or have no clear patron. On November 1 the whole company of heaven stands in for theirs.
The hidden faithful of every nation. The vision in Revelation names no country and no language. The multitude comes from every tribe and people. The feast looks after Christians who live their faith where it is dangerous or unseen, and the ones who simply live it quietly.
Every Christian called to be a saint. This is the most personal patronage. The feast is for you as much as for anyone in the martyrology.
As for relics, there is no incorrupt body to point to, because the saints of this feast are far too many to count. The Pantheon in Rome stands as the oldest monument to it, a pagan temple turned into a house of witnesses. In a wider sense the Church itself is the monument. In parishes and chapels all over the world, people gather each year to honor those they could not name.
A Prayer for the Feast of All Saints
Almighty and everlasting God, you have given us one solemnity in which to honor the merits of all your saints. We ask that, as we have so many intercessors, you would pour out upon us the fullness of your mercy. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Octave of All Saints (by Father Francis Xavier Weninger, 1876)
All holy men and women of God, Pray for us.
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