welcome back to my favorite time of the week the mailbag first question up from raven hi michael you mentioned you like halloween can you give an explanation of the holiday other than a celebration of darkness and an opportunity for witchcraft evangelists thanks raven i absolutely can do that uh what we're preparing to celebrate on november NUMBER_TOKENst is all saints day right so we're uh this is a great holy holiday this was uh begun in the NUMBER_TOKENth century uh gregory iii consecrated a chapel in the basilica of saint peter to all the saints and fix that anniversary for the first of november goes back even a little further than that in terms of the way that we celebrate these things and so halloween is the eve of this feast day um now it it takes on it's taken on this other kind of role you know it's not like we all merely dress up as saints although my little baby is going to be dressing up as a saint for halloween and it's going to be extremely cute but it takes on this dimension of the departed souls it takes on this dimension of the saints who are in heaven it takes on this dimension of some spooky kind of things right there it was alleged after the protestant revolution by the protestant revolutionaries that als that halloween rather is just a christian a catholic version an attempt to co-op a pagan holiday and there were a lot of claims made like this after the protestant revolution about christmas for instance about easter and they're just not true and i'm not i don't mean this just to dunk on some of the protestant revolutionaries and pr people but it's just not true you know the when people tell you that uh christmas was dated to december NUMBER_TOKENth because it was just a pagan holiday and it was the catholics trying to co-opt it or something or easter whatever that that is not the case uh these dates go all the way back to the very beginning of the church or very nearly to the very beginning of the church and the reason for it for for instance in the case of christmas is because it was understood by the early church fathers that a divine life has a perfection to it it has a perfect symmetry to it and they uh dated the conception of christ to his death on the cross and so what happens nine months later you get the birth of christ that would just be one one example of that and they dated the crucifixion to uh to the spring so we could go on for hours and hours about all of these various dates um but that is the the dating of halloween is because of the celebration of all of the saints i also think yeah you shouldn't be performing witchcraft on halloween and you shouldn't be like worshiping the devil but making fun of the devil and making fun of demons is extremely christian and cool and fun uh because there's saint john vianney great catholic priest in france uh and patron saint of parish priests he used to call the devil a little idiot he'd say oh there's that little idiot again you know he's setting my bed on fire haha what a stupid little idiot so i think it's fun
NO_SEGMENT_TOKEN