HOW TO LIVE A LITURGICAL LIFE
PART II: THE CATHOLIC LITURGICAL YEAR
1. An Overview
After considering the liturgical day, week, and month, we now come to the Catholic liturgical year.
Through the liturgical year, we annually re-live the life of Christ, from His first coming (the Nativity) all the way through to His second coming (General Judgment) at the end of time. Throughout the year the Church celebrates – by means of the Mass and the Divine Office – various events in the life of Christ and honors many of the canonized saints. In fact, many Protestants are shocked to learn that the Mass is celebrated daily – not just on Sundays. And they are even more shocked when they learn about the hundreds of feast days occurring throughout the year. Whereas many Protestants will celebrate Christmas and Easter, a Catholic sees nearly every day of the year dedicated in some way to a unique saint or mystery of the Faith.
Every year the Catholic Church remembers certain key events in the life of Christ – His birth, death, Resurrection and Ascension. The feast days commemorating the birth and death of Christ are each preceded by a time of preparation – Advent and Lent, respectively.
Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year and is an approximate four-week time of preparation for the celebration of the birth of Christ. It begins around the end of November and ends with Christmas.
Christmas is always celebrated on December 25th. The Reverend Dom Prosper Gueranger, a French Benedictine abbot who lived 1805-1875, wrote a long series of reflections on the different liturgical seasons of the year, in fifteen volumes (although he did not live to complete his monumental work). Father Gueranger’s Liturgical Year volumes are the gold-standard in knowledge on the liturgical year. If you could only afford to buy just one set of books on the liturgical year, save up and buy his volumes.[1] They are incredible. For instance, Father Gueranger wrote the following about the characteristics of Christmas:
“It is twofold: it is joy, which the whole Church feels at the coming of the divine Word in the Flesh; and it is admiration of that glorious Virgin, who was made the Mother of God. There is scarcely a prayer, or a rite, in the Liturgy of this glad Season, which does not imply these two grand Mysteries: – an Infant-God, and a Virgin-Mother” (Gueranger, 4)
And Father Gueranger has lengthy reflections for every traditional feast day in the year. Now, Christmas itself is not merely a single day but an entire liturgical season – as is also true of Easter. And following Christmas we have a third season: Epiphany.
After the Christmas and Epiphany seasons we come to Lent, a time of repentance. Lent is actually preceded by a 17-day period of pre-Lent called Septuagesima, and then Lent officially begins on Ash Wednesday. This observance is on the Wednesday 46 days before Easter and features the imposition of blessed ashes on the faithful’s foreheads. The priest traces the sign of the cross on each person’s forehead (though for clerics he does it instead on the head at the place of tonsure) while saying, “Remember man that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.” It is a day of mandatory fasting and abstinence. This sets the tone for the entire Lenten season. As the Saint Joseph Sunday Missal urges us:
“The ashes on your forehead have only as much meaning as you are giving them. Make this symbolism a meaningful beginning of a time of penance, preparing to celebrate the paschal mystery of our Lord’s death and resurrection.” (Saint Joseph Sunday Missal, p. 233)
The Lenten season is penitential, so we are asked to devote time to spiritual and corporal acts of mercy as well as to prayer, fasting, and the giving of alms. In all of these ways, we can make satisfaction for venial sins if we are in the state of grace. Catholics often give up for Lent things such as candy or watching television although, as we will discuss later, much greater sacrifices are needed and asked for. The notion that Catholics are only asked to give up chocolate for Lent is scandalous. The sacrifices of our forefathers in the Faith put today’s Catholic to shame.
Catholics should also participate more in the liturgical life such as by attending daily Masses during the week or making the Stations of the Cross on Fridays. This is also a particularly important time to confess our sins to a priest and receive God’s mercy in the Sacrament of Confession. Lent is traditionally forty days – excluding Sundays – of both fasting and abstinence (i.e., refraining from eating meat).
The final two weeks of Lent are traditionally called Passiontide, and Lent culminates in the second week of Passiontide, called Holy Week, which commemorates the final days of Our Lord’s life on earth before His Crucifixion. Palm Sunday starts Holy Week and on that day, we commemorate Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Many of the crowd who shouted “Hosanna” and placed palms before His path only a few days later demanded His death. The Liturgy for Palm Sunday shows us the great inconstancy of human beings. How fast we are to forget.
On Holy Thursday we remember the Institution of the Holy Eucharist and on Good Friday, the crucifixion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Good Friday is also a day of required fasting and abstinence and is the most somber day in the entire year. The day after, Holy Saturday, is a day of mourning and quiet. God has died and sleeps in the tomb. We then arrive at the most joyous celebration of the entire year, the crowning joy of the liturgical life: Easter Sunday!
Easter bursts forth as we hear of Our Lord’s rising from the dead, the greatest proof of His own divinity. Astonished, His Apostles and disciples first hear of His resurrection and then see His risen body. The Easter season is a period of joy for us as well and lasts for fifty days, eclipsing the long forty days of fasting and penance during Lent.
Jesus did not stay with His Apostles for long, but ascended to Heaven forty days after His Resurrection. We celebrate this fortieth day after Easter Sunday on Ascension Thursday. However, Our Lord promised not to leave us as spiritual orphans but to send us the Holy Ghost – first, to the Apostles, to confirm them in the Faith, to sanctify them, and to enable them to found the Church; and secondly, to all Catholics (upon receiving the Sacrament of Confirmation), to sustain and comfort them in their trials.
Following the Ascension, the Apostles gathered in Jerusalem, waiting for the Holy Ghost. We celebrate the coming of the Holy Ghost on Pentecost Sunday, 50 days after Easter Sunday. On the Sunday after Pentecost we then have Trinity Sunday to honor the Blessed Trinity. This day also begins the period called Time after Pentecost, which continues until Advent when the liturgical cycle begins again. This particular season is the longest and includes such notable feasts as Corpus Christi, the Precious Blood, the Sacred Heart, the Immaculate Heart, the Assumption, and the Exaltation of the Cross.
On the last Sunday of October we then celebrate the Social and Universal Kingship of Jesus Christ, namely that He is not only King of every man and family, by nature and by right, but that He is also King of every public institution and of all nations. Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat!
At the end of the liturgical year, that is the month of November, the Church focuses our attention on the End Times. It calls to mind more emphatically the Church Triumphant (Saints), our need to offer suffrages[2] for the Church Suffering (Poor Souls in Purgatory), the Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell), and Christ’s Second Coming when this world shall be destroyed by fire and all will face the General Judgment.
[1] Most of this monumental work is now available on the Internet and you can read it gratis, for example, at the site hosted by Liturgia Latina.
[2] Suffrages (Catholic definition): 1. Masses, prayers, penances, or acts of piety offered for the repose of the souls of the faithful departed. 2. The prayers prescribed or promised for specific intentions.