All Saints, All Souls: Honoring the faithful dead

SALT LAKE CITY — "Trick or treat!"

That phrase coming from the mouths of tiny costumed ghosts and witches on Saturday echoes centuries of Church tradition.

Going from door to door in costume reflects a time when people believed the spirits needed to be appeased on a night when the veil separating the living and the dead was pulled back.

When, in 844, Pope Gregory IV set Nov. 1 as the date to honor all the saints, some of the pagan traditions for the day continued. However, the All Saints Day honors not only "the officially recognized saints, but the baptized of every epoch and nation who sought to carry out the divine will faithfully and lovingly," said Pope Benedict XVI during his 2006 All Saints Day homily at the Vatican Basilica.

"The solemnity of All Saints is both a look back at those who have gone before, as well as a commitment to what we must become: a holy people united together by a common life in God," according to The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship.

To commemorate those who have ‘gone before us marked with the sign of faith,’ the Church offers Masses for the Dead but with the acknowledgement that there is hope for eternal life after the death of our current existence.

"Christian hope, however, is not solely individual, it is also always a hope for others," said His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI during the Angelus of the Commemoration of All Souls on Nov. 2, 2008. "Our lives are profoundly linked, one to the other, and the good and the bad that each of us does always effects others too. Hence, the prayer of a pilgrim soul in the world can help another soul that is being purified after death. This is why the Church invites us today to pray for our beloved deceased and to pause at their tombs in the cemeteries."

In many parishes, a Book of the Dead is kept, listing those who have died so that parishioners can offer petitionary prayers for them.

In Utah, the Hispanic celebration of El Dia de los Muertos is "a reminder that the dead are always with us," said Susan Northway, director of religious education for the Diocese of Salt Lake City.