What religious holiday is it today?

[Hessian]

Reformation Day

In somber remembrance of the thousands of believers who risked all to print the Scriptures in their native tongue, who defied the Papal edicts and met the wheel or the fire, who fled to distant lands including our own, who pointed out that our faith should rest solely on scripture and not accumulated non-biblical traditions...who insisted on the right to choose what church they attend and who their pastor should be...

A Mighty Fortress is our God,
A Bulwark never failing.
Our Helper, He amidst the Flood
Of Mortal Ills prevailing.
For still our ancient Foe,
doth seek to work us woe-
His craft and power are great,
and armed with cruel hate,
on Earth is not his equal.

Did we in our own strength confide,
Our striving would be losing.
were not the right man on our side,
The Man of God's own choosing.
Dost ask who that may be?
Christ Jesus it is He.
Lord Sabaoth His name,
From age to age the same,
and He must win the battle.

Our identity as a nation and the pillars of our freedoms can be traced back to the Reformation...that is today's holiday.

Herzliche Danke
Jesu Christ,

Evangelishe Hessian.

 

[JKG]

being the non-religious person, I'm curious. One of my co-workers mentiones it was a religious day today and he was going to church services for lunch. :shrug: Can anybody edumacate me? Nobody else in the office seems to know either.

New Year's Day. To the ancient Celts, anyway. They celebrated the death of the old year and the birth of the new at November 1st. Since the year was shifting, the veil between life and death was considered to be very thin at this time, and ghosts and spirits could walk among the living on the night before the new year started. Hence, the emphasis on ghosts and goblins at this time.

The Catholic church adapted this Celtic holiday by calling November 1st All Saints' Day (or All Hallow (i.e., holy) Day), and so the night before it became All Hallow's Eve (Halloween). The church decreed November 1st to be a day of Holy Obligation; people were required to go to mass to pray for the souls of the dead and to remember the saints. Later, All Souls' Day was added on November 2nd, to give the less-than-saintly souls some more prayer time. Prayer was thought to help lessen a soul's time in purgatory and to help them get into heaven.

By the 1400s, the tradition of praying for the souls of the dead had become institutionalized. The church said you didn't have to do all the praying yourself; you could pay someone else to say the prayers. To those worried about the fires of hell (either for themselves or for a loved one), paying for prayers could seem like a reasonable form of insurance. You could even buy "indulgences" for sins, which was like buying forgiveness before you committed the sin.

This "paying for praying" turned into quite a racket, and Martin Luther denounced it on All Saints' Day (in 1518, I think). As Hessian noted, the day is remembered by Protestants as Reformation Day, the official start of the Protestant Reformation, though there had been efforts to reform the church for centuries before that. Luther eventually gave up on reforming the Catholic Church and started a new church.

All Saints' Day is still a Holy Day of Obligation, and all Catholics are supposed to go to mass on November 1. Other Holy Days of Obligation are all Sundays (including Easter), December 25 (the Nativity), January 1 (Mary's Day), August 15 (Assumption of Mary into Heaven), and December 8 (Feast of the Immaculate Conception). Holy Days of Obligation vary from country to country; in Ireland, St. Patrick's Day is one, in England, they observe the feast day of St. Peter and St. Paul.