Day: October 30, 2025

How the Early Catholic Church Christianized Halloween

After the Romans conquered ancient Celtic realms, pagan traditions were adopted into a holiday honoring Catholic saints.

Halloween may be a secular affair today, dominated by candy, costumes and trick-or-treating, but the holiday is rooted in an annual Celtic pagan festival called Samhain (pronounced “SAH- wane”) that was then appropriated by the early Catholic Church some 1,200 years ago.

The ancient Celts were an assortment of tribes and small kingdoms once scattered across western and Central Europe with distinctive languages and culture, explains Frederick Suppe, a historian specializing in Celtic and medieval history at Ball State University in Indiana.

Even after the Romans conquered their realm, Celts continued to survive and thrive in places such as Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Scotland, and Wales.

Halloween Inspired by Samhain

Samhain, the Celtic festival that is the ancestor of Halloween, was related to the Celts’ way of looking at the world. “All the Celtic peoples conceived of a fundamental dichotomy between light and dark, with the former representing positive, lucky, fruitful values and the latter representing negative, threatening, destructive values,” Suppe explains.

The Celtic year began at sundown at the end of the autumn harvest, continued through the… Click here to read the rest of this article about How the Early Catholic Church Christianized Halloween

October 31, 2025 Current Southern Hemisphere/Tomorrow’s Northern Hemisphere Moon Phase

You can find more moon phase details on both of the websites used in this post by clicking on each hyperlink.

Source: nineplanets.org

he Moon phase for October 31st, 2025 is a Waxing Gibbous phase. This is the phase where the moon is more than 50% illuminated but has not yet reached 100% illumination (which would be a Full Moon).

In the Northern Hemisphere, the right side will be illuminated, and in the Southern hemisphere it’ll be the left side that is illuminated.

The Waxing Gibbous phase, like all moon phases, will last for…

Fun fact:

Phase Details

Phase: Waxing Gibbous

Moon age: 9.91 days

Moon illumination: 69.94%

Moon tilt: 107.873°

Moon angle: 0.53

Moon distance: 378,887.19 km

Moon sign: Pisces

Source: MoonGiant.com

You can use this link to go forward or backward in time for Moon phase information. If you are curious, you can even find out what phase the Moon was in when you or anyone else was born.

Waxing Gibbous phase. Visible through most of the night sky setting a few hours before sunrise. This phase is when the moon is more than 50% illuminated but not yet a Full Moon. The phase lasts about 7 days with the moon becoming more illuminated each day until the Full Moon.

During a Waxing Gibbous the moon rises in the east in mid-afternoon and…

Today’s Waxing Gibbous Phase

The Waxing Gibbous on October 31 has an illumination of 71%. This is the percentage of the Moon illuminated by the Sun. The illumination is constantly changing and can vary up to 10% a day. On October 31 the Moon is 9.39 days old. This refers to how many days it has been since the last New Moon. It takes 29.53 days for the Moon to orbit the Earth and go through the lunar cycle of all 8 Moon phases.

Phase Details

Phase: Waxing Gibbous
Illumination: 71%
Moon Age: 9.39 days
Moon Angle: 0.52
Moon Distance: 379,814.18 km
Sun Angle: 0.54
Sun Distance: 148,470,770.18 km