All Saints’ Day: Calling the undead and the unsaintly

Every Nov. 1, Filipino cemeteries become a curious mixture of chapel, picnic ground, family reunion, and open-air restaurant. Families arrive with flowers, candles, folding chairs, roasted meat, and enough provisions to survive a siege. The dead receive prayers, the living receive lunch, and somewhere between the rosaries and the lechon the saints are forgotten. Why contemplate holiness when there are relatives to remember, food to share, and leftovers to bring home? Heaven can wait. The family feast cannot.

Catholic devotion to saints has long suffered from a peculiar misunderstanding. Some fundamentalist groups denounce it as idolatry, as though Catholics were running a celestial beauty pageant featuring rival gods. But the Church distinguishes veneration from worship. Saints are not substitutes for Christ. They are witnesses to His transforming grace. We seek their intercession as we ask friends to pray for us. Their lives point us toward God, not away from Him.

Curiously Nov. 1 is not ordinarily a holy day of obligation in the Philippines, unlike in countries such as the United States, subject to applicable ecclesiastical rules. Our bishops presumably have their reasons. Still, a little more encouragement to celebrate the saints would do us good. Remembering our dead is beautiful. But surely we can spare a thought for those whose holy lives deserve to be remembered, too.

Meanwhile Halloween has become a fashionable cultural import. Children parade as zombies, witches, and ghosts. Some costumes look as though their wearers have escaped a particularly unsuccessful medical experiment. Schools and exclusive provincial circles join the festivities lest anyone accuse them of being old-fashioned. There is nothing wicked about harmless costumes. Yet hallow means holy, and All Hallows’ Eve was the vigil before All Saints’ Day. Somehow the saints have lost the costume contest to the undead. Even holiness cannot compete with fake blood.

The saints offer more than seasonal entertainment. They show us virtue in action. St. Lorenzo Ruiz endured persecution without surrendering his faith. St. Pedro Calungsod embraced a dangerous mission. St. Thomas More chose conscience over royal favor. Holiness is not an ornamental halo awarded for good attendance at Mass. It means doing right when wrongdoing is easier, safer, and sometimes more profitable.

Our public servants might learn something from these lives. Public service means serving the public, not enjoying a lifetime subscription to privilege. Yet when scandals surface, some officials perform every maneuver except the simplest miracle: saying, “I was wrong.” Questions become conspiracies. Accountability becomes persecution. Responsibility becomes somebody else’s problem. For certain officeholders, innocence is automatic, humility is intolerable, and the public is merely an audience expected to applaud those who have forgotten whom they serve.

G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” The Church is hardly exempt. Some parishes invite children to Mass dressed as their favorite saints. This admirable practice deserves wider adoption. Let children discover St. Francis through compassion for creation and St. Monica through perseverance. Holiness should be more than a list of names to memorize before an examination.

Fellow gentlemen of the cloth, we must examine our consciences, too. We cannot preach humility for decades while treating criticism as persecution. We must not be long on sermons and short on practice. Grand vestments cannot conceal shabby conduct, and a clerical collar is no exemption from ordinary decency. Holiness must show in how we treat the poor, exercise authority, and accept correction. Otherwise Dong Abay’s irreverent phrase, “Banal na aso, santong kabayo,” becomes less a joke than an uncomfortable diagnosis. Dear brothers, the punchline may be standing at the altar.

This Nov. 1, let us bring the flowers, light the candles, share the food, and remember the dead. Then let us tell our children about the saints. Teach them that holiness means doing right when nobody applauds and admitting fault when everybody is watching. The cemeteries will empty. The monsters will return to their closets. Our politicians will return to their favorite refuge: the sound of their own speeches. And the saints will keep asking why we praise virtues we refuse to practice. Perhaps the real horror is not the zombie at the cemetery gate, but the respectable soul who preaches goodness and would rather die than admit a mistake. At least the zombie has the excuse of being dead.

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Fr. Cyrain Cabuenas is a Catholic priest from Borongan, Eastern Samar, who currently serves in the State of Vermont. He is a former correspondent of the Philippine Daily Inquirer Visayas bureau.