All Saints Day

  All Saint’s Day (sometimes a Holy day of Obligation - where we are obligated to participate in the Mass) honors all martyrs (people who suffer persecution and death for refusing to renounce a belief, usually religious) and saints (people who dedicated their lives to God and served others unselfishly) known and unknown. In 835 Pope Gregory IV ordered the Feast of All Saints be universally observed on November 1^st. We pray to our Saints (refers to a person who has been formally canonized [officially recognized] by the Roman Catholic Church, and is therefore believed by this church to be in Heaven) for them to intercede or pray for us.  On this day we also pray for guidance, courage, and faith to also be able to follow God in all that we do each and every day.

   The holy mother Church offers us a wonderfully consoling and balanced way of looking at death. On All Saints Day (Saturday, 11/01) we celebrate the glory of the saints in heaven. The church teaches that everyone in heaven is a saint, and All Saints Day is dedicated to all the “unofficial” saints in heaven. We have a bunch of men, women and children who are canonized (official) saints, and each one has a day assigned to them. On All Saints Day we celebrate everybody else in heaven. Think of your loved ones who have died and gone to heaven. This is a chance for you to be happy for — and with — them. You and I rejoice that they are perfectly happy being with God and everyone else in heaven. They have no pain, no frustration or annoyance, all they know is absolute, complete happiness because they can see (i.e., understand) God perfectly. On this day we rejoice for them.
   On All Souls Day (11/02) we mourn our dead. Even though we rejoiced for them the day before, today we admit that we may still feel some sense of pain or loss because of their separation from us. We’re not afraid or ashamed to cry or grieve. After all, Jesus wept over the death of His friend, Lazarus. We don’t grieve because we lack faith or because our faith is weak. We grieve because the people we love aren’t with us like they used to be.

The beauty of these two days together is that they are so honest and healing: we admit our joy for our departed, and we admit our sorrow at the distance. It’s just like life, isn’t it — we take the good with the bad, and we let Jesus make sense of it for us.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.

-Fr. Douglas J. Guthrie

Activities

 Let’s Talk About Saints

-         Discuss Saints and their good works and their faithfulness to God.

-         How can we live and act as the Saints?

o       You will find a complete listing of all Catholic Saints at this website.

o       http://www.catholic.org/saints/stindex.php

Future Saints

-         On a wall post “On Our Way to Sainthood!”

-         Have each child create a likeness of themselves & cut them out.

-         On the cutouts have them write positive attributes about themselves.

Loyola Press - Saint Activities
 

Spoon Saints

-         Saint Nicholas

-         Use a picture of your favorite saint to create your own spoon Saint.