All Saints Day vs All Souls Day

All Saints Day honors the saints: everyone who has died and is now with God in heaven, from the apostles and martyrs to people whose names no one remembers. It is a day of celebration. All Souls Day remembers all the faithful departed and, in Catholic practice, prays for them, especially for those who may still be undergoing the purification Catholics call purgatory. It is a day of prayer, and of grief held in hope.

One way to hold them together: on November 1 the Church thanks God for those who have finished the race, and on November 2 Catholics pray for all who have died in Christ. The first is mostly praise. The second is mostly intercession.

All Saints Day honors every saint in heaven: the famous ones with their own feast days and the countless others whose names only God knows. The Catholic Church keeps it as a solemnity, one of its great feasts, and the Episcopal Church counts it among its seven principal feasts.

The feast grew out of the early Church's love for its martyrs. At first each martyr was remembered on the anniversary of his or her death, but when persecution produced more martyrs than there were days, churches began to keep a shared day for all of them. In Rome, Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon, once a temple to all the gods, to Mary and all the martyrs on May 13 in 609 or 610. In the 700s Pope Gregory III dedicated a chapel in St. Peter's Basilica to all the saints and fixed its feast on November 1, and in the 800s Pope Gregory IV extended the November 1 celebration to the whole Church.

All Souls Day, which the Catholic Church calls the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, is kept on November 2. It rests on Catholic teaching about what happens after death. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that people who die in God's grace and friendship, but are not yet fully purified, are assured of heaven, and are purified after death so they can enter its joy. The Church calls this final purification purgatory, and teaches that it is entirely different from the punishment of the damned (1030-1031).

Because of this, Catholics pray for the dead. The Church has honored the memory of the dead from its beginning and offers prayers for them, above all at Mass, and it also commends almsgiving and works of penance on their behalf (1032). All Souls Day gathers that prayer into one day for everyone who has died.

The Catechism grounds the practice partly in 2 Maccabees 12:46, where Judas Maccabeus makes atonement for the dead so that they might be delivered from their sin. Second Maccabees is in the Catholic Bible, but it is one of the books Protestant Bibles leave out (more on that in how many books are in the Bible).

A yearly day for all the faithful departed spread from the Benedictine monastery of Cluny in France. Its abbot, St. Odilo (who died in 1048), ordered the monasteries of his congregation to keep it every year, and the custom spread from there. Orthodox Christians pray for the departed too; the common prayers published by the Orthodox Church in America include one for them.

If All Souls Day finds you grieving, you are not alone in it, and you do not need the right words. Our prayers for grief may help, and what happens after death walks through what the Bible promises.

Many Protestant churches keep All Saints' Day. The Episcopal Church counts it among its seven principal feasts, and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod lists it on November 1. The Revised Common Lectionary, the shared table of Sunday readings compiled by churches including the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the United Methodist Church, and used by most mainline Protestant churches in the United States and Canada, sets readings for it. In 2026 they are Revelation 7:9-17, Psalm 34, 1 John 3:1-3 and the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:1-12.

For many Protestants the day is about the whole family of faith, not only the famous saints. In the New Testament, saint is a word for every believer: Paul writes “to all the saints in Christ Jesus which are at Philippi” (Philippians 1:1, KJV). So many congregations use the season to give thanks for their own members who have died.

Most Protestants do not pray for the dead. They hold that believers who die go to be with Christ, “absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8, KJV), and that the Bible does not teach purgatory, so they remember the dead with thanksgiving and hope rather than with prayers for them. Some Anglicans keep All Souls as well: the Church of England's calendar includes November 2 as the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, and in its service for that day the names of those being remembered may be read aloud.

October 31 has its own meaning for Protestants too. It is Reformation Day, which remembers October 31, 1517, when Martin Luther made public his Ninety-five Theses. Lutherans keep it on their calendar, the day before All Saints' Day.

Christians who keep these days differently still read the same passages. Here are three that sit underneath both of them.

Hebrews 12 comes right after Hebrews 11, the Bible's long roll call of men and women who lived by faith. The cloud of witnesses is that company of believers who have finished their race. Their lives call out to ours: keep going, the way is worth it.

John's vision shows the end of the story: a crowd no one can count, from every nation, standing before God. It is the first reading for All Saints Day in the Revised Common Lectionary this year, and it is a fair picture of what the day celebrates.

Paul does not tell grieving Christians not to grieve. He tells them not to grieve “even as others which have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13, KJV). Because Jesus rose, those who have died in him will rise too, and that hope runs under both days. Catholics also cite 2 Maccabees 12:46 for praying for the dead, as noted above; Protestants, whose Bibles do not include that book, generally find no call in Scripture to pray for the dead and rest instead on promises like these. In Faithero you can read Hebrews 11 and 12, the Bible's roll call of the faithful, and have the chapters read aloud.

Halloween is short for All Hallows' Eve. Hallowed is an old English word for holy, and the hallows are the saints, so Halloween simply means the evening before All Saints Day. The Church traditionally kept a vigil that night, preparing for the feast with prayer and fasting. Whether Christians should take part in today's Halloween is a separate question, and faithful Christians answer it differently. We look at it in Is Halloween a sin?

In Mexico, the Day of the Dead, Día de los Muertos, runs from the end of October into the first days of November. In the tradition, the souls of loved ones return for a visit, and families welcome them with flower petals, candles and offerings laid from the cemetery to the home, and with their favorite foods set out on home altars and graves. UNESCO, which includes it on its list of the world's intangible cultural heritage, describes it as a fusion of pre-Hispanic religious rites and Catholic feasts.