What Goes on at Halloween and the Following Day at the Joliet Cemeteries of SS. Cyril & Methodius, St. Joseph, Holy Cross, and St. Mary Nativity? The Slavic people in Joliet (and throughout the world) carry on ancient traditions in their cemeteries this time of year that most other people don’t understand. You may notice that around Halloween, but especially in the evening on November 1, these four Slavic cemeteries will probably be filled with people most of the evening. What’s going on? It’s part of a three-day observance. Catholics celebrate the saints’ days with great merriment. Practically the whole world knows how to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day with the Irish Catholics on March 17 or Saint Valentine’s Day on February 14. Kay Rura Moleski reported on this site that she remembers as a child celebrating October 28, the feast of St. Jude Thaddeus, at St. Thad’s School with a day off from school. There are, of course, many more saints in heaven than the ones we know about, and so once a year, on November 1, we observe a holy day called All Saints Day, in which we honor all the saints in Heaven, the ones whose names and stories we know and those we do not know anything about. This has always been one of the most important holy days of the year for us and for centuries it has been celebrated with banquets and parties and prayer services that have included the fun of having children dress up as their patron saints. Catholic children are baptized with a saint’s name and that saint remains in their lives as a protector, a guide and a good example of gospel living. Therefore, children are brought up to know about their patron saint; dressing like them at Halloween is another way of getting to know that saint and his/her story better. (The word “Halloween” means the evening before All the Hallowed Ones, that is, All the Saints.) The celebration usually began the evening before the feast day, so the more frivolous dressing up like the saints and the partying usually happened on October 31 while the more serious attendance at Mass and prayers happened on November 1. Instead of understanding that for Catholics the saints are good friends who set a good example for us and who serve us as prayer partners and intercessors, Martin Luther worried that people were adoring the saints and so among his followers he discouraged the reverence for the saints that is so typical of Catholics. That’s why the customs associated with the saints between Catholics and Protestants can be so different from each other. On November 2, after we have remembered All the Saints, our minds turn toward All the Souls. This feast day is meant to remind people to pray for all those who have died who are not yet in Heaven. Our Protestant friends are at a loss for how to understand this feast, but it is very important for us. The biblical text of 2 Maccabees 12:46 reads that “it is a holy and laudable thing to pray for the dead.” A biblical injunction to pray for the dead translates into the belief that there must be some people who have already died who can still benefit from our prayers, meaning that there must be some dead people who are not condemned to hell but who are not yet sufficiently purified for heaven. Perhaps they are still too attached to their sins. This persuades us to believe that there must be a waiting place or a place of purification – which we call Purgatory – in which the souls of some people are waiting and in their waiting, can be helped by our prayers. The Bible tells us so. Believing that we can somehow do something kind or beneficial for our loved ones who have died but who may not yet be in Heaven– such as praying for them or having Mass offered for them or giving to charity in their name – is an enormous comfort to us in our grief and so is very popular with Catholic people. All Souls’ Day is the one day of the year when we all remember to do this together, we offer Masses for the dead and we go to their graves to pray for them. The custom developed among Slavic people to somehow dress or decorate the graves that evening against the harsh weather of winter just around the corner. People are especially sensitive that day or evening toward family members of those who have died within the past year and the custom has developed of taking food and drink and fellowship to console one another over the loss of family members that evening, most especially those whose families have fresh graves that year. So this year on November 1, if you drive past any of Joliet’s Slavic cemeteries – Saint Joseph’s between Raynor and Clement; SS. Cyril & Methodius on the east side; Holy Cross on West Theodore or Saint Mary Nativity on Caton Farm Road, you may see groups of people there who are praying for their beloved dead at their graves and possibly taking a swig of Slovak slivovica (or Croation šljivovica, or Slovenian slivovka) from a flask or enjoying a slice of potica and enjoying conversation with old neighbors. The reason our Protestant friends don’t know this custom is that Martin Luther did not agree that the Catholic Church made all the right decisions in 397 at the Council of Hippo when she officially acknowledged once and for all which writings belonged in the Bible. So in the 16th Century, when Martin Luther rejected certain parts of the Bible (this material sometimes appears today in the back of Protestant bibles and is called the Apocrypha) this quote about praying for the dead from Maccabees was among the biblical passages he deleted from Scripture. Since then, whereas Catholics continue to have a biblical warrant for believing in Purgatory and praying for the dead, Protestant bibles do not include that teaching. After the Protestant Reformation, Protestants no longer believed in the things that Catholics continued to find important relative to November 1 and 2, and so the observance of All Saints Day and All Souls Day would probably have fallen away with non-Catholics, but the celebrations were so enjoyable and beloved by the people that Protestants found them hard to abandon totally. As a result, over years, especially in Protestant countries like England, the custom of dressing up like the saints and praying for the dead got playfully transformed into themes related to ghosts and graveyards and goblins and dressing up like spooky or even favorite characters and the like developed.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 18:46:13 +0000