All Saints

All Saints is the great solemnity on which the Church honors the whole company of the blessed in heaven — not only the martyrs and canonized saints whose names fill the calendar, but the countless multitude of the holy ones, known to God alone, who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb and now behold his face. It celebrates the communion of saints, the bond of charity that unites the pilgrim Church on earth with the Church in glory and the souls being purified.

The veneration of the martyrs gave rise in the early centuries to a common feast of all the saints, which came to be fixed in the West on 1 November when Pope Gregory III dedicated a chapel in honor of all the saints at St. Peter's, a date later extended to the universal Church. The solemnity holds up before the faithful the goal of their own calling — holiness — and the great cloud of witnesses who intercede for them, and it is kept as a holy day of obligation.