Every year, as Halloween approaches, critical voices are raised. Some focus on the consumerist drift of this Anglo-Saxon tradition, while others emphasize its pagan nature. These are important and converging criticisms, because the capitalism of our time is creating its own new liturgical year, with new holidays (Black Friday) and others that are taking the place of Christian ones.
Without demonizing this new holiday—which, incidentally, our children really enjoy—let’s try to approach the issue from a different angle. The meaning and issues associated with Halloween must be sought at an even more fundamental level—one that is ethical or anthropological in nature. For we carry within us throughout our lives a fear of death, which sometimes turns into anguish and makes our existence very difficult. To have a flawed relationship with death, therefore, means to have a flawed relationship with life.
The dawn of Homo sapiens civilization coincides with the earliest forms of the cult of the dead, when people began to sense that death was not the final word on life. And so they sought to transcend the dramatic yet partial truth of the Song on the Origin of Death of the Sudanese Denka people: “The sun is born, dies, and returns. And the moon created. The moon rises, dies, and then returns. Man, too, created. Man is born and dies and never returns.” On a day long ago, some of our ancestors instead sensed that something true of us remains after death, that ‘a small remnant’ returns. They understood that something of the presence of those we have loved manages to survive their death.
We cannot, then, understand millennia of civilization, art, and literature, or religion, without that fundamental ethical stage in human evolution, when Homo sapiens became a creature capable of communicating with the dead.
Christianity continued and strengthened the relationship between the living and the dead, which it had found well established in the Roman world. Christian piety developed in continuity with the Latin tradition, rather than with the biblical one, which did not have a true cult of the dead. In particular, within the Catholic world, the veneration of the deceased’s grave and the liturgical celebration of their memory through Masses for the dead have always held an important place. In my family, both of these traditions are alive and well, and my parents were able to pass them on almost intact to their children—though it is less certain that they will be passed on to their grandchildren. In the humble, everyday gesture of visiting the cemetery, a living dialogue with those we have loved continued and continues: we speak words to them, and they continue to speak them to us, if we know how to listen in the necessary, loving silence. In matters as decisive as death, it is always the poor and the humble who have the right ideas and words—heaven exists in part thanks to their waiting and their prayers.
Our remembrance, our visits, and the words we exchange give them new life and redeem them, partially but truly, from the absolute dominion of the realm of the dead. This is also because Christ’s resurrection—a pledge of our own—has widened, in both quality and quantity, the opening through which we can reach those who are no longer with us but who, in mystery, continue to exist. The Mass for the dead, stripped of the “economic” encrustations that have accumulated over the centuries—“Father, I saw that there were four other deceased people at the Mass with my father: does my Mass apply to my dad only for ⅕?” a priest friend of mine told me—and from archaic remnants (feeding the dead to keep them placid)—it is another very important aspect of the proper veneration of the dead: the liturgical context strengthens the dialogue fostered by visits to graves, and individual remembrance also becomes a communal event.
Through these visits and Masses, we thus give our loved ones the chance to continue their presence among us; we give them the gift of sharing different words with us—words they had not yet spoken. For the French philosopher J. Derrida, the “gift to the dead” is the purest form of gift-giving. The day these rites of remembrance for the dead come to an end—replaced by hollow pumpkins and “trick-or-treating”—we will not only cede further ground to the new religion of business, but we will also shorten the “life” of our departed and lose touch with the soul and pietas that have inhabited our lands and our hearts for millennia. And we will all be much poorer for it.
At stake, then, in the growing trend of Halloween rituals is the very soul of our civilization; an invisible battle is underway between those who seek to educate the younger generations in serious and profound values, and those who continue the process of trivializing collective symbols—a process that began years ago with Christmas.
There is no better legacy to leave our children than the gift of the possibility of a peaceful relationship with death—and thus with life. A relationship that begins with visits to our deceased grandparents, who are not the past but our roots—and roots are the present and future of the tree, including the tree of civilization. Death is too serious a matter to entrust to the market and its priests.