All Saints

On November 1 the Church keeps the Solemnity of All Saints — the feast of all the holy ones, known and unknown, who have entered the vision of God. The feast gathers the whole company of heaven: the apostles and martyrs, the doctors and confessors, the virgins and widows, and the countless millions whose names no chronicle has preserved but whose holiness the Church commends. The Beatitudes of the day's Gospel — "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" — are the charter of every saint.

The feast was fixed on November 1 by Pope Gregory IV in 835, at the request of the Emperor Louis the Pious. It was originally kept in May, as the anniversary of the dedication of the Pantheon in Rome — the ancient temple of all the gods — which Pope Boniface IV had rededicated as a Christian church in 609, dedicating it to the Blessed Virgin and all the martyrs. The May date was the dedication anniversary; the November date gave the feast its universal scope. From Rome, where the Pantheon still stands as the church of Santa Maria ad Martyres, the feast passed to the whole Western Church.

Every pilgrimage destination in this directory is, in its own way, a shrine of a saint. All Saints is the feast that holds them all together — the shrines of the apostles at Rome and the Holy Land, the Marian shrines from Lourdes to Fatima to Guadalupe, the shrines of the martyrs and confessors from Canterbury to Krakow. The feast's second reading, from the Book of Revelation, gives the number: "a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb."