Servicii funerare Bradu - All Saints Day and All Souls' Day

All Saints Day and All Souls' Day - what's the difference?

At the beginning of November people go to the graves of their deceased loved ones, bring flowers, clean the grave and light candles. But do you know where this custom is coming from, what popular beliefs are liked to it or how people in other countries celabrate it? Our articles will present you everything what you ever wanted to know about Souls’ Day.

All Saints' Day, also known as All Hallows Day, Day of All the Saints, Solemnity of All Saints, or Feast of All Saints and All Souls’ Day is often mixed in peoples mind because in the calendar of the Catholic Church they are on consecutive days.

All Saints Day is a major Catholic holiday held on the 1st of November and commemorates the beatific souls. According to the Catholic Chruch Christians are divided into three gorups: Church Militant, or those who live and struggle on earth, Church Suffering, or those who died and are suffering in Purgatory and Church Triumphant, or those who are already in Heaven. All Saints Day commemorates the Saints of the church and all those in Heaven. In the Christian East it was celebrated as a remembrance day of the martyrs since the end of the 4th century, while in the Christian West they started to celebrate it only at the beginning of the 7th century, when IV Boniface took over the Panthenon, which was originally built for pagan gods and consecrated it to Mary and all the martyrs. Back then the holiday was on the 13th of May.

In the early Chistian Church they didn’t try to abolish pegan holidays, because it wouldn’t have been a successful attempt, but they tried to put the Christian holidays on the same date to shift the attention from pagan traditions to Christian ones. For this reason Pope Gregory III moved the remeberance day of Virgin Mary and the martyrs from 13th of May to 1st of November, which was the date of more pegan holidays and then became the day of the „Holy Virgin, all the apostoles, martyrs and all the deceased saint people around the earth”. In the beginning of the 9th century, when Gregory IV was the pope, it became a universal celebration and was officially recognized by Franc Emperor Louis the Pious in the whole empire. Conform tradition the celebration was extended from Virgin Mary and the martyrs to all the saints when Byzantine emperor Leon IV built a church in the memory of his wife with a holy life, which couldn’t have been dedicated to her, so it was dedicated to all the saints.

All Souls’ Day is a major Catholic celebration held on the 2nd of November. Although the commemoration of the dead has been part of Catholic liturgies since the 3rd century in times of early christianity, only in the 10th century was picked a special day for this. It was the idea of benedictine abbot St. Odilo, who thought that it would be good to commemorate not only the souls that already are in Heaven, but, according to the division of the Catholic Church, the ones that suffer in Purgatory as well. This habbit became more and more popular until the 11th century thanks to the Benedictine monks, but it became an official holiday only in the 14th century. The eve of this was known as the Eve of the Death, when the bells sang for 1-2 hours in the memory of the deceased.