Ours is the only culture in history that mocks the devil while pretending he doesn’t exist.
Every Halloween, we flirt with the infernal, pretending it’s all make-believe—until something evil happens, and then we stand astonished that the line between play and peril has worn so thin. Halloween is, strangely enough, the one night when modern secular man admits he believes in something beyond himself—only he chooses to believe the wrong thing. Having lost his saints, he now settles for skeletons.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Over the past year, places of worship have become scenes of unthinkable carnage: at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, a gunman opened fire during a children’s Mass, killing two students and wounding over a dozen others. In Michigan, a man rammed his truck into a Latter-day Saints chapel, opened fire on congregants, and set the building ablaze—four dead and eight more wounded. And of course, Charlie Kirk—a strong and outspoken Christian who never hesitated to proclaim his faith—was brutally murdered, a sobering reminder that even courage in the public square can carry a deadly cost.
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We are witnessing not merely moral confusion but violent hostility toward faith itself. In a culture that laughs at evil, it should surprise no one when evil has the last laugh.
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Can the two phenomena—the way we celebrate Halloween and the open antagonism toward faith—be connected? It would be naïve to say that horror movies or Halloween costumes cause mass shootings. However, it would be equally naïve to pretend that a society that delights in mocking evil isn’t slowly being desensitized to the real thing.
We have made darkness a game; then we act shocked when darkness stops playing by our rules. C.S Lewis famously said in The Screwtape Letters that “the devil…is a proud spirit…and cannot endure to be mocked.” But that only applies if God is living inside us. In a society that has lost much of its faith, the opposite is true. When the devil becomes a joke, he no longer needs to hide. He can come out and run wild.
The frightening fact is that our laughter has become the devil’s camouflage. What began as innocent Halloween fun has, over time, hollowed out our sense of reverence, leaving our souls open to temptation, confusion, and corruption.
Look around you. This October—and every October in recent memory—a supposedly Christian nation throws a party for death. Halloween has become a $13 billion annual industry. We drape our homes in cobwebs, hang skeletons on the door, create cemeteries in our yards, and glorify gore to a ridiculous degree, and we call it fun.
And indeed, it is fun.
But that’s not always how it’s been. For centuries, All Hallows’ Eve—the true name of Halloween—was not a flirtation with darkness but a vigil of light—the night before All Saints’ Day, the beginning of a three-day feast known as All Hallows’ Tide. Together, these days invited the faithful to meditate on the beautiful doctrine of the Communion of Saints: the Church Triumphant in Heaven, the Church Suffering in Purgatory, and the Church Militant still striving on earth—all united in Jesus Christ. It was a trinity of remembrance that dared to look death squarely in the eye and say, “You have no sting left.”
That’s a far cry from today’s unhealthy fascination with the macabre.
Yet the popularity of Halloween does reveal something hopeful. Beneath the cynicism, commercialism, and Styrofoam tombstones lies a hunger for the transcendent. The child who dresses as a vampire or zombie, in his own innocent way, is reaching for a mystery beyond his understanding. He or she is reaching for the truth that there is more to life than the material; there is more to life than the random movement of lifeless atoms and molecules in a lifeless ether.
There is spirit.
That’s why Catholics need not retreat from Halloween festivities. The Church has always been the master of transformation, the great baptizer of all things pagan. The Pantheon in Rome, for instance, once a state temple dedicated to various deities, was exorcised by Pope Boniface IV on May 13, 609 and dedicated it Santa Maria ad Martyres. The Church, like Christ Himself, has the power to turn water into wine. Halloween can be redeemed too—if we remember what it was meant to signify. The costumes, the candy, even some harmless spookiness, can all point toward a deeper joy: the fact that evil is real but temporary; the fact that death is frightening but defeated.
Good catechesis is the key. Dressing as a saint or angel is a lovely custom, but even a child dressed as a skeleton can learn something holy—if he is taught that bones are not just creepy but sacred relics, reminders of the resurrection to come. Parents should teach their children the line between play and profanity, between harmless fun and real possibility of inviting evil into their lives. For evil does its greatest damage not so much in the imagination as in the will that consents to it. Today, we must take that threat more seriously—the risk that pretending can easily turn into permission.
The goal for a good Catholic, therefore, is not to cancel Halloween but to reclaim it. The candle inside the jack-o’-lantern can remind us that the soul shines only when it’s been set aflame by grace. A cemetery walk can become an instruction on mortality. A child’s knock at our door to trick-or-treat can become a lesson in charity, a reminder that every visitor is an image of the Christ who stands and knocks at the door to the human heart. Even nervous laughter in a dark room can echo the first lines of the Te Deum—“We praise Thee, O God.” For whenever we refuse to be ruled by fear, even a faint smile becomes an act of faith that whispers, I will not be afraid, for You are here with me, Lord.
