What Is All Saints Day, and Who Is It Actually For?
There are not enough days in the year, and that is the entire reason this one exists.
The Church has a counting problem, and All Saints is the solution to it.
The calendar has three hundred and sixty-five days. The number of people the Church believes are in heaven is, by its own account, beyond counting. Those two facts cannot both be accommodated, so once a year there is a day that simply says: and everyone else.
The reading at Mass on November 1 is the passage from Revelation that gives the feast its shape. A great multitude, it says, which no one could number, from every nation and tribe and people and tongue.
No one could number them. That is not poetic exaggeration in this context. It is the operating assumption.
Who it is for
This is the part worth being clear about, because it is usually left vague.
All Saints is not primarily a feast for the famous ones. Francis and Teresa and Nicholas already have days of their own. November 1 is for everybody who does not.
The overwhelming majority of the saints, on the Church’s own understanding of the word, were never canonized, never investigated, never written about, and are not on anybody’s calendar. The process the Church uses is modern, slow, expensive, and applied to a vanishingly small number of candidates. It was never meant to be a census. It identifies a few people with certainty; it does not pretend to be the list.
So the feast covers the rest. The ones nobody wrote down. Which, if you take the doctrine at face value, includes a very large number of ordinary people, and quite possibly your grandmother.
That is an unusual thing for an institution to build into its calendar: a formal, annual admission that its own records are radically incomplete.
The Pantheon
The feast grew because the early Church ran out of room.
Christians marked the anniversary of a martyr’s death from very early on. That worked while the martyrs could be counted. After the persecutions under Diocletian they could not, and churches in the East began keeping a single common feast for all martyrs rather than attempting one each.
In Rome the decisive moment came in the early seventh century, when Boniface IV took the Pantheon, a temple built for all the gods, and dedicated it as a church to Mary and all the martyrs. The building had been constructed to hold everybody. It went on doing exactly that under new management.
An annual commemoration followed. A century later Gregory III dedicated an oratory at St Peter’s to all the saints, and in the ninth century Gregory IV extended a November 1 observance to the whole Church.
Why November
The honest answer is that nobody is certain.
The commonly repeated explanation is that the date was chosen to fall on the Celtic festival of Samhain and absorb it. This is a real scholarly argument rather than an invention, but it is a good deal less settled than the internet suggests. The November date was already in use in parts of the Irish and English and Frankish world before Rome universalized it, and whether Gaelic practice put it there, or whether it arrived from another direction entirely, is genuinely disputed.
There is also a thoroughly unromantic theory that has nothing to do with anybody’s festival: Rome in the spring could not feed and house the pilgrim crowds a major feast attracted, and November, after the harvest was in, could.
What can be said without argument is that the Roman thread, the one running through the Pantheon and St Peter’s, is documented and continuous, and does not depend on the Samhain question going one way or the other.
Where Halloween got its name
Here is a small thing that gets the story backward constantly.
A hallow is a holy one. To hallow is to make holy, which is why the Lord’s Prayer asks that a name be hallowed. All Saints was called All Hallows, and the evening before a feast is its eve, or in older English its even.
All Hallows’ Even. Hallowe’en. Halloween.
Whatever anyone has since done with costumes and porch decorations, the word itself is the name of the vigil of this feast, and it came from the Church rather than to it. October 31, November 1 and November 2 are one unit, sometimes called Allhallowtide: the eve, the day, and the day after.
All Saints is not All Souls
These get confused constantly, and the difference is simple.
November 1, All Saints, is for the holy dead who are in glory. It is a celebration. The Gospel reading is the Beatitudes.
November 2, All Souls, is for the faithful departed who are not there yet, and the Church prays for them rather than to them. It is a quieter day, and it was given its date at the monastery of Cluny around the year 998.
The first is about the ones who arrived. The second is about the ones still on the way, and about the people still here who miss them. If the September feast for grief is the day for the wound, All Souls is the day for the names, read out loud in parishes everywhere from a list the congregation writes.
November 1, 2026
All Saints is a solemnity and in most years a holy day of obligation in the United States, which usually means an extra trip to Mass.
Not in 2026. November 1 falls on a Sunday, and the solemnity outranks an ordinary Sunday, so it simply is the Sunday Mass. You are going anyway and this is what you will get. All Souls follows on the Monday and is not a day of obligation.
The feast for the uncounted
The thing that makes this day worth more than a box on a calendar is the modesty of it.
Nearly every other saint’s day is a claim about a specific person: this one, we are confident, and here is why. It took centuries of argument to be that confident about a woman as well documented as Monica, who was never formally canonized at all and is honored by custom rather than decree.
November 1 makes no claim about anyone in particular. It is the Church saying that the real number is much larger than the list, that most of it is unknown to us, and that one day a year it would like to mark the whole thing anyway.
If you have somebody in mind reading that sentence, the feast is working.
A saint like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of Saints by Mail: printed, reverent, and mailed to your door. A thoughtful gift for godchildren, families, and anyone who loves the saints.