All Saints 2025
Apocalypse 7:2-4, 9-14; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12
The Feast of All Saints 1971 gave me my first taste of seminary liturgy at its almost best. Not quite all the stops were pulled out—that was reserved for the Easter Vigil—but it was highly impressive nonetheless. Actually, I had been impressed by my first experience of Mass in Ushaw, when I had made a sort of exploratory visit during the previous Lent. At quarter past seven on a weekday morning, the college clock had chimed, the organ had struck up, and a hundred and twenty-something male voices had belted out an opening hymn. It struck me that a place where people sang enthusiastically at that time of the morning had something going for it.
Since then, I had become familiar with Solemn High Mass each Sunday morning, with its dignified entry procession, antiphonal singing between schola and church, and enough smells and bells ((though more of the former than the latter) to set the cherubim and seraphim jigging in the heavenly choir. A Feast Day though, was something else.
During the 1980s, “celebration” was to become a buzz word. Every Mass was announced as a “celebration”, usually by priests who would then produce the most mind-numbingly dull liturgy imaginable. On that long-ago First of November, however, I discovered something of what the word really meant.
It wasn’t just the Mass: the whole day was kept joyously. There were no lectures, there was a special meal, and the afternoon was free to do whatever one wished. On that day, I discovered how our forefathers and foremothers in the faith had celebrated Feasts.
Growing up in the 50s and 60s, I--and I suspect, many of you—had experienced Feasts as rather grim affairs, especially if they were Holy Days (or Holidays) of Obligation. The clue should have lain in that word “holiday”. A “holiday” was originally a Holy Day, on which people were free from work to attend Mass and to enjoy themselves in honour of some religious occasion, or some favourite saint; and such days were frequent in Catholic Europe.
Much of this came to an end with the Reformation. Saints’ days were abolished, and all that remained, especially on the island of Great Britain, was a dour Sabbath, a day not for recreation or enjoyment, but for reading the Bible, all punctuated by frequent visits to church to hear long sermons largely devoted to the topics of sin and damnation.
Those parts of the continent which resisted the Reformation fared better. Hilaire Belloc, whose view of European Catholicism was admittedly somewhat romanticised, expressed it in various ditties. The one which sticks in my mind runs “Wherever a Catholic sun doth shine, there’s always laughter and good red wine. At least I’ve always found it so: Benedicamus Domino”.
On this island, those Catholics who survived, and who gradually were enabled to emerge from hiding, kept the saints’ days, but without the freedom from labour which had previously marked them. Now, as victims of the “Protestant work ethic”, Catholics found that the emphasis was no longer on “holiday” but on “obligation”. It became a matter of “fitting Mass in” wherever one could, before or (later) after work, or during the dinner hour, with the priest tending to hurry Mass through, conscious that the majority of the congregation had to be away quickly, to begin or to return to work.
So, through no fault of people’s own, Holy Days became a matter of duty, not celebration, with the laity forced to clockwatch through Mass, whilst the priest had to celebrate Mass shorn of all the “trimmings”, probably more frequently even than on a Sunday, in an attempt to meet people’s needs. What we have now is practically the reversal of the original concept of a Feast Day.
What is the answer? I do not know. Many years ago, a priest whom I used to help out on a Sunday, and who was far from being a radical or a revolutionary, used to maintain that, if there was no holiday, there could be no obligation. I can understand the logic of that.
This year, and today, however, for most people, with this Feast falling on a Sunday, there is an opportunity to celebrate as we should. And it is a Feast worth celebrating, as we rejoice in all those fellow-members of the Body of Christ who have gone before us and who dwell eternally in the presence of Christ, and as we prepare for a day and a month in which we devote ourselves to supporting those for whom the process of perfection is still a work in progress. Today, follow the injunction of the prophet Ezra: “Eat the fat, and drink the sweet wine”. A joyous Feast to one and all.
