What if you happened to meet an old crone in the local park who could read your mind, heal your heart disease, and prophecy your future? Would you accuse her of witchcraft? Strict Puritans would have done so in the year 1692, for that’s what spawned the Salem witch hunt in New England— a much grimmer version of Halloween. Thirty people, mostly women, were falsely accused, tried on flimsy evidence, and executed.
America’s pilgrim Puritans, in defiance of the Catholic Church’s ancient doctrine and traditions, would never celebrate Halloween or Christmas. They called Easter the devil’s holiday. They despised how the Church had absorbed into Halloween the pagan Celtic festival of Samhain, where people in costumes would dance around huge bonfires to ward off ghosts and goblins. The Puritans rejected as idolatry the “cult” of the Virgin Mary and Catholic saints and all miracles not found in Scripture. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the iron-clad door of a German cathedral on All Hallows Eve, he sparked a purgative, far-reaching reformation that shook the Church to its foundations.
In my youth, I also questioned biblical miracles. Did they actually happen, or had the Church imagined them to spice up the Bible? Who could prove to me the Bible miracles had happened as described? I learned that America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson—with a polymath IQ of 150– had published in 1804 his stripped down version of the Christian Bible, missing any mention of supernatural miracles. His attitude typified the then-prevailing Protestant sentiment: that anything supernatural was superstitious poppycock, bait to attract a gullible public. In his unbelief, he discarded the capstone event of Jesus’s resurrection — the greatest of all biblical miracles, the sine qua non of Christianity (cf. 1 Cor. 15:12-19). He was America’s Doubting Thomas who apparently hadn’t suffered enough to experience Christ’s wounds.
My father was a Free Mason of high rank who never mentioned Christ in our home. When Halloween came around, he didn’t walk the neighborhood with us kids costumed as witches and saints .Attending engineering college further weakened my faith due to the rapid socio-cultural changes from scientific progress. Technology quickened the rationalist skeptic in me. Halloween was nonsense, and I never attended mass on All Saints Day. Bold scientific accomplishments promised a material heaven on earth, endless nuclear energy and a disease- free society. I swallowed the “good news” that resurrection miracles would only come from the god of science.
Shortly after I graduated, my paternal aunt, a Third Order Franciscan, had traveled to Italy and met a humble Franciscan priest named Padre Pio. When she returned, we met to discuss his remarkable ministry. He worked miracles and wonders that were challenging hardcore skeptics like me. Even his own Franciscan brothers were fearful of his supernatural powers. At one point he was ostracized and reprimanded by his superiors who suspected him of being a fake. But after Padre Pio’s holiness attracted hundreds of pilgrims who waited in long lines for confession, the lucrative income from that daily stream of devotees silenced his*envious brothers.
The Holy Ghost manifested some spooky deeds through his servant, Padre Pio. WWII fighter pilots reported an apparition of him in the sky, the sheer fright of which turned them back from bombing a village. He was known to bi-locate, appearing in two places at once, thousands of miles apart. He was able to read minds and reveal unconfessed sins that prompted dramatic conversions. One famous episode involved an embarrassed bishop who failed to say his required daily mass on his arrival in Rome. No one but the Holy Ghost could have known. The saint healed from afar at the very hour asked, like Jesus had done for the official’s son (cf. John 4:46-54).
What spooked me was St Pio receiving the stigmata the very day he predicted his own death fifty years later.
After ankle-biter ghosts and witches have done their best to scare us on All Hallows Eve we will celebrate a canonized Padre Pio on All Saints’ Day. The Holy Ghost must have had fun working miracles through his many saints, attempting to scare the hell out of half-believers like me. What it took for me to finally believe in those miracles recorded in Christian Scriptures—especially the Resurrection of Jesus Christ– was reading in Butler’s Lives of the Saints that more than 400 Catholic saints had raised the dead.
The greatest miracle worker was Saint Vincent Ferrer who resurrected thirty people from their graves. I can’t imagine the frightened awe of onlookers. A Devil’s Advocate from Rome would have investigated that startling report as just an exaggerated fabrication. After watching him raise a corpse from a cemetery grave, even the Advocate would have bent a knee to pray, as did I, after envisioning his many miracles with my historical eye.
Halloween is meant to scare us like that.
“Verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father (cf. John 14:12).”
THE TRIQUETRA OF LIFE: Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness 
Leave a comment