The New Liturgical Year begins on the First Sunday of Advent. Thus, we just began the new liturgical year on December 1, 2024.
With the New Year comes another opportunity to go deeper into the Church’s Liturgy. While those who are new to Tradition often are amazed at the additional saints’ Feast days in the Church’s Liturgical Year and are surprised with all the forgotten liturgical seasons (e.g., Septuagesima), even Traditional Catholics can go deeper each and every year. Praying the Votive Mass texts each week, reading the Propers for the Masses in Some Places, and reading the daily Martyrology are just some of the ways we all can go deeper this year. All of these actions will help us live more liturgically each and every year.
The Liturgical Year and Its Two Cycles
The Church’s Liturgical Year is a harmonious interplay of feasts and fasts interwoven in both the Temporal and Sanctoral cycles that define the rhythm and rhyme of Catholic life. The Church’s annual liturgical calendar is comprised of these two different, concurrent annual cycles.
First, the Proper of the Seasons, or Temporal Cycle, traces the earthly life of Our Lord Jesus Christ. In the Roman Catholic Church, it consists mainly of Sundays related to the various liturgical seasons – that is, the seven liturgical seasons contained in three cycles which pivot about the three major Christian Feasts: Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost.
The Temporal Cycle begins with Advent and includes the seasons of Christmas and Epiphany; this is the Christmas Cycle. The Easter Cycle then includes the seasons of Septuagesima, Lent, and Easter. The Feast of Pentecost begins the third cycle: the Time after Pentecost (though some arrangements group it into the Easter Cycle). It is the longest liturgical season, lasting at least 24 weeks or nearly half the year. The determination of the date of Easter dictates nearly all the other dates in this cycle.
Then there is the second cycle: the Proper of the Saints, called the Sanctoral Cycle, which is the annual cycle of Feast days not necessarily connected with the seasons.[i]
The base level of living a Catholic liturgical life is assisting at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and praying the prayers and living the feasts and fasts of the day, which the Church is liturgically keeping. Even if we are not assisting at Mass, we can and should pray the Church’s liturgical prayers, whether that be in the form of a Missa Sicca at home or by praying the Divine Office or the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The Changes to the Catholic Liturgical Year after Vatican II
Step one of going deeper into the liturgy is to move from the Novus Ordo Calendar to the Traditional Calendar of 1962. Even though many changes occurred before Vatican II, they pale in comparison to the changes made after it. With the introduction of the Novus Ordo Rite of Mass, more than 300 saints were removed from the General Calendar, as the flagship article “The Sanctoral Killing Fields: On the Removal of Saints from the General Roman Calendar“ calculated.
The results of these changes have greatly affected Catholic life. How many Catholics today are familiar with St. Telesphorus, the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, Saints Cletus and Marcellinus, the Seven Holy Brothers, St. Thelca, St. Placid, St. Ursula, or even St. Barbara? These saints gave a powerful and memorable witness to our holy Faith. They provide poignant inspiration for us in these turbulent times and are models we should all strive to emulate. Yet, all these and more were removed from the liturgical calendar, leaving all parishes named after such saints orphaned with no patronal Feast day remaining on the universal calendar.
While hundreds of changes occurred to the Sanctoral Cycle in 1969, there were still considerable changes to the Temporal Cycle with the introduction of the Novus Ordo Mass. These changes included the following:
- Removing Septuagesima entirely, thus continuing the use of the Alleluia until Ash Wednesday. This change made easing into Lenten penance much harder.
- Eliminating the requirement to veil statues and images during Passiontide. (The last two weeks of Lent are called Passiontide and this period of intensification of Lent was effectively eliminated.)
- Replacing Time After Epiphany and Time After Pentecost with a strangely named “Ordinary Time” season that is split in half and is seemingly unrelated to the Liturgical Year. Worse, this season no longer references itself to one of the major events in the life of Christ and His Church. Such a change vastly split the “3 cycles with 7 seasons” Temporal Cycle which the Church celebrated since time immemorial.
- Moving a number of temporal Feast days, like the Feast of Christ the King (from the last Sunday of October to the final Sunday before Advent) and the Feast of the Holy Family (from the Sunday after January 6th to the Sunday in the Octave of Christmas).
The changes made after Vatican II also affected how we refer to Feast days. In 1969, the ranking of Feast days was changed to solemnities, feasts, memorials, and optional memorials. In the 1962 Missal, we have First, Second, Third, and Fourth Class Feast days. But for centuries before the 1962 Missal, up until the changes made by Pope Pius XII in 1955, the ranks of Feast days were, from least to most important: Simple, Semi-double, Lesser Double (also known as Double), Greater Double, Double of the Second Class, and Double of the First Class.
The Changes to the Catholic Liturgical Year Before Vatican II
But we can go deeper. And the next layer is to transition, at least in our own personal devotional lives, to a pre-1954 Calendar.
In addition to the significant changes and alterations made to the Holy Week Liturgies in the 1955 Missal, there were also a few other noteworthy changes. With the advent of the 1955 Calendar, Pope Pius XII instituted the Feast of “St. Joseph the Worker” on May 1. (Simultaneously, he moved the Feast of “Saints Philip and James,” which was sometime previously a Holy Day of Obligation, from May 1 – where it had been since at least the sixth century – to May 11.) In doing this, he also suppressed the Patronage of St. Joseph that – since Pope Pius IX’s decree of September 10, 1847 – had been celebrated on the second Wednesday after the Octave of Easter. In 1954, Pius XII also instituted the Feast of the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary on May 31; and to make room for it, he moved the Feast of St. Angela Merici to June 1.
The year 1955 saw some of the most significant changes to the Church’s liturgy since the Council of Trent. In Cum Nostra Hac Aetate (March 23, 1955), Pius XII abolished 15 Octaves in addition to the Octave for the Dedication of a Church, and particular octaves for patrons of various religious orders, countries, and dioceses. He also abolished roughly half of all vigils, leading to the removal of the liturgical vigils of the Immaculate Conception, Epiphany, All Saints, and for all of the Apostles except the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. The total number of liturgical vigils was now reduced to seven. These vast changes affected both the Temporal and Sanctoral cycles.
Additional changes that occurred in 1960 under Pope John XXIII included the removal of most saints who were on the calendar twice. For instance, the Feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross, the second feast of St. Agnes commemorating her apparition to her parents, and the Feast of St. John before the Latin Gate were all removed. These changes were incorporated in the 1962 Missal; however, a priest may still choose to offer a votive Mass for those saints on those traditional Feast days.[ii]
To be continued…
ENDNOTES:
[i] There are more than 20 different Catholic Rites and several Churches which are all in Communion with and under obedience to Rome. All these Catholics are fully Catholic in the complete sense. The Rites of various Eastern Catholic Churches (e.g., the Byzantine Rite, the Syro Malabar Rite, etc.) use entirely separate calendars with separate saints commemorated, separate Holy Days of Obligation, and separate days of fasting and abstinence.
A liturgical diversity in the calendar is seen even in the West. Beyond the Roman Rite, the Ambrosian, Mozarabic, Lyon, and Bragan Rites are also all part of the Western liturgical tradition. So too are the various Rites for religious orders (e.g., the Carmelite Rite, the Dominican Rite). There are various “Uses of the Roman Rite” as well, such as the Anglican Use (i.e., the Ordinariate) – which was only recently approved under John Paul II. These “Uses” are also part of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, there is no one Catholic calendar, but the calendar mentioned by most Catholics is the Roman Calendar used in the Roman Rite.
[ii] See “Honoring Saints Twice: St. John, St. Michael, and the Eastertide Feast of St. Joseph” for more information.