While Halloween is now synonymous with drunken costume parties, slasher movies and hordes of little monsters pilfering candy from their beleaguered neighbours, this wasn’t always so. But neither was it ever (really) Catholic.
Every year, as the winds chill and the pumpkins fatten in their patches, a well-intentioned theologian will pipe up to insist that Halloween is “really” a Christian festival – a misunderstanding, they argue, of All Hallow’s Eve. It is an earnest attempt to reclaim something that was never truly ours to begin with. A pious attempt, perhaps, but a false one.
