Nov 2nd All Souls Day. Separating superstition from verity.

All Souls Day has nothing to do with scary things, nightmares or Coco.

It’s a Catholic holiday when the living remember our beloved deceased family and friends. In the Mexican culture, All Souls’ Day is known as Día de los Muertos or the Day of the Dead.

Pixar immortalized such belief in the movie Coco.

Common Sense Media gives the film 4 out of 5 stars writing that Coco is "colorful, beautifully animated, and culturally vibrant, Coco is an affecting, multilayered coming-of-age drama. Miguel just wants to make music, even though it's forbidden to him because his family believes that music cursed them." It's actually more than that: it's artistically appealing and so well-made, it makes it on more in a myriad Hollywood films that contribute to The Subliminally Forced Conversion.

Forced Conversion Spectrum: From Subliminal to Explicit:  From Coco to AntiCatholic Midnight Mass by self-described atheist Mike Flanagan

Just like in the Middle Ages, people believed the souls of the dead could appear on this day in the form of witches, toads or will-o’-the-wisps. Will-o'-the-wisps are ghosts with lanterns fated to wander aimlessly for removing their neighbor's boundary markers. They believed graveside food offerings supposedly eased the rest of the dead.

While the Church has encouraged prayer for the dead from the earliest times as an act of Christian charity. “If we had no care for the dead,” Augustine noted, “we would not be in the habit of praying for them.” Yet pre-Christian rites for the deceased retained such a strong hold on the superstitious imagination that a liturgical commemoration was not observed until the early Middle Ages, when monastic communities began to mark an annual day of prayer for the departed members.


In the middle of the 11th century, Saint Odilo, abbot of Cluny, France, decreed that all Cluniac monasteries offer special prayers and sing the Office for the Dead on November 2, the day after the feast of All Saints. The custom spread from Cluny and was finally adopted throughout the Roman Church.

The premise of the feast is the acknowledgment of human frailty. Since few people achieve perfection in this life but, rather, go to the grave still scarred with traces of sinfulness, some period of purification seems necessary before a soul comes face-to-face with God. The Council of Trent affirmed this purgatory state and insisted that the prayers of the living can speed the process of purification


Thus All Souls Day is a day for commemoration of all the faithful departed. The prayers of the faithful on earth helps cleanse these souls in order to fit them for the vision of God in heaven, and the day is dedicated to prayer and remembrance. It is part of the three-day triduum dedicated to remembering the dead, beginning with Halloween (October 31) and followed by All Saints’ Day (November 1) and All Souls’ Day (November 2)