CNA has published two good articles with last-minute Halloween advice and information. In the first, Father Javier Ortega, a priest of the Diocese of Alcalá de Henares in Spain, advises against costumes of demons, witches, and the dead.
What he says toward the end is a lovely reflection on combating evil with beauty:
Cultivate beauty to combat Halloween
The priest reminded that “beauty will save the world” [that’s a famous quote from Dostoevsky] and that it’s very important to educate children in beauty: “We must care for children’s imagination, so that they have beautiful and lovely things in their imagination.”
He thus recommended that there shouldn’t be “ugly pictures” in the children’s rooms but images of the Virgin, the guardian angel, and “that children be blessed every night, that they hear words of blessing, words from heaven, words of hope.”
“We live in a world that is very harmful to children, where there are ugly things and things that truly attack purity of heart, the innocence of children… So we must fight against this with all our might,” he said.
The second article — Spooky, scary, saintly? How Catholics can see Halloween at its best — features the advice of Bishop David Konderla of Tulsa, Oklahoma, on being proactively Catholic for Halloween and thereby combating the mundane spirit (or worse spirits) that are part of the modern observance of the Vigil of All Saints.
Here is something beautiful featuring death, a detail from a work of the great Spanish artist, Francisco de Zurbarán:
Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy (ca 1638), by Francisco de Zurbarán (detail, original image heavily cropped). © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, via Wikimedia Commons.
