A Note From Our Pastor: October 18, 2026

In the note I included in the Monday e-newsletter, I referenced our culture’s distorted experience of Halloween. Admittedly, when I was a child, I thoroughly enjoyed it: the costume, the crazed pursuit of candy! To be clear, I wasn’t Catholic and I had no awareness of All Saints Day or All Souls Day.

There’s a clear connection between these Church feast days and Halloween (together, known traditionally as All Hallows Eve) although it’s become lost on American culture. Much like our culture’s short-sighted approach to Christmas and Easter, it’s almost impossible, if one enters the Halloween megastores to see anything that hearkens to the Christian understanding of what it all represents: death and life thereafter.

I’m not suggesting that if I had grown up with awareness of All Saints Day and All Souls Day, that as a child I would not have wanted to celebrate our culture’s reduced version, Halloween. I was a kid after all, and dressing up as a superhero and getting candy still would have had appeal. But so much of American culture’s celebration of All Hallows Eve is rooted in things I mentioned in Monday’s e-newsletter, evil things, even if we’ve put a “fun” and “friendly” face on it. There’s a reason so many horror movies are released in this season.

So, what’s all the scariness about? For some reason, many of us enjoy the thrill of being frightened. Why else would we pay to go through those seasonal ‘haunted houses’? I kind of get it, but at the same time, I bemoan how far we’ve drifted from the fuller meaning of what our faith teaches in this season. And in whatever way it can drift into tampering with things associated with evil, or in whatever way people see a costume as a chance to go over the top with immodest dress—that’s not good.

So, is it wrong to celebrate Halloween? Not necessarily, but I believe it must be put properly in its context. I’ll explain. From a Christian view, we celebrate Allhallowtide, a triduum of sorts. It begins on with All Hallows Eve/Halloween (Oct 31), continues with All Saints’ Day (Nov 1) and culminates on All Souls’ Day (Nov 2). This fuller view reminds us that we are part of something beautiful and transcendent—not scary—something we call the Communion of the Saints—that we, the living (the Church Militant), along with the saints in heaven (the Church Triumphant), pray for our beloved dead (The Church Penitent), praying that all things would be oriented toward and ultimately, in heaven.

All this should come to mind as we approach Halloween, which on its own is an incomplete presentation of what we believe, something beautiful and so important: Allhallowtide.

Yours in Christ,

Father Todd O. Strange