As we all rise from our chocolate hazed over minds and scrub off the zombie makeup to begin the first day of November, it seems like just another day. One of my former students/current Facebook friends commented, "Halloween's over; get ready for Christmas." But from a historical viewpoint, November 1 is an important day also.
October 31, All Hallows Eve, might be day that the veils between the world of the living and the world of the dead are at their thinnest, allowing those who have passed over to walk among us again, but November 1 is seen as All Saints' Day. This is the day that you go to church to pray for the saints, those who spent their lives or even sacrificed their lives for the religious cause.
In 1517, the Catholic Church was so riddled with corruption that German Augustinian monk Martin Luther had had enough. He wanted to protest to the church leadership but he knew that wouldn't do him any good. Any written protest he sent to Rome would be ignored; any spoken protest might end up with him disappearing. So Martin Luther used the October 31/November 1 holidays to his advantage.
He knew that everybody partied on All Hallow's Eve. It was fun to go out and celebrate, ignoring that little bit of fear that spirits were walking the Earth that night. Luther also knew that the next day, November 1, all the party goers would be at church to pray for the saints. This was the perfect canvas for Luther to post his protests.
Before dawn on November 1, Martin Luther snuck up to the front doors of his own church, Wittenburg Cathedral, and nailed several papers to the front doors. On these papers he had listed 95 problems that he believed high-ranking church leaders needed to address. Over time, these problems have been collectively referred to as the 95 Theses.
This was such a smart move to make. Luther knew that everybody might be bleary-eyed from the night before but they would stop to read the papers at the door. And then they would start talking about what was written there. It is often extremely difficult to make changes at the top but if you can get all the people at the bottom to talk change, change happens.
In the end, Luther got the change he wanted, just not necessarily in the way he wanted. The 95 Theses actually ended up sparking a 30 year long set of religious wars that changed history forever. From Luther's ideas, the Protestant Reformation swept through Europe, splitting the Christians in two. This was what opened the door to not only Catholicism but also Protestantism in the Christian world.
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