We will soon come back around to the season of Advent, which as we all know is really about commercialization of Christmas and fighting over whether Christmas music should be played even as on TV there are reports of atheists attacking Nativity scenes in parks.
Of course Advent is really about our preparation for the Second Coming of Christ at the same time as we are to prepare spiritually for the feast of the Nativity.
At the end of the liturgical year with the traditional Roman calendar, there are some oddities to counting the Sundays.
Here is something I wrote a while back about this calendar issue.
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As we approach the end of another liturgical year, a strange thing happens in the Church’s traditional, pre-Conciliar calendar. After the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost, the Sundays left over after Epiphany, way back after Christmas, are pulled out of the freezer, warmed up and served. And “left over” is not a flippant description. In the older Missale Romanum our Sunday is “Dominca quinta quae superfuit post Epiphaniam”. Superfuit is from super-sum, which the super Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary , indicates is “to be over and above, either as a remainder or as a superfluity”.
So how can Sundays be ‘left over’?” Here is what happened.
In structuring our liturgical calendar we Christians depend on the vagaries of the moon. The date of Easter each year is fixed according to when the spring full moon occurs. Since the moon isn’t always full on the same date, the date of Easter Sunday shifts. Lent, however, has a fixed length. Thus the beginning of Lent slides around, earlier or later depending on that spring full moon. At the other end of the equation, Epiphany (the real Epiphany) is a fixed date: 6 January. Since the beginning of Lent slides around, the time between Epiphany, which begins on 14 January, and Ash Wednesday and Septuagesima (three weeks before), is longer or shorter depending on when the moon is full in the spring. There can be many as six Sundays between Epiphany and Septuagesima which can fall from 18 January to 22 February, that is from the 2nd until the 6th Sunday after Epiphany. Therefore, when Lent begins earlier the texts for as many as four Sundays after Epiphany slated to be celebrated up to Septuagesima must be skipped. On the other end of the Lent/Easter cycle, Pentecost also shifts its date. Pentecost is always the same number of days after the movable Easter. The twenty-four Sundays allotted after Pentecost are not enough to get us all the way to the end of the liturgical year, back around to Advent. Depending on the date of the spring full moon, there can be a gap of a several Sundays between the 22nd after Pentecost and last Sunday before Advent. Therefore, Holy Church uses those “movable” Sundays left over after Epiphany as fillers until the final Sunday of the year, which liturgically is always the 24th Sunday after Pentecost … even if it isn’t ordinally the 24th. So, at the end of the Church’s year, in the traditional calendar, we usually get left over Sundays.
In the newer, post-Conciliar calendar the shift in the moon also changes how many Sundays of “Ordinary Time” we can squeeze in after the Christmas season ends with the Baptism of the Lord (a mystery yanked away from the Feast of Epiphany). Again, due to the shifting dates of Pentecost some of the Sundays of Ordinary Time in the middle of the calendar are blotted out by the tail end of the Easter season. At the end of the liturgical year in the newer calendar, the last Sunday is always fixed as the 34th Sunday of Ordinary Time, celebrated as the Solemnity of Christ the King. In the older calendar Christ the King is observed on the last Sunday of October.
In the older, traditional calendar we have not only the rather more interesting Septuagesima and the pre-Lent Sundays, we also have the Seasons of Epiphany and Pentecost for what is called our tempus per annum… “time through the year”. In the post-Conciliar calendar we call the tempus per annum “Ordinary Time”. “Ordinary” refers to “order” rather than “ordinariness”. The Novus Ordo’s “ordered” time is split into two unequal parts. An old clerical friend of mine calls them “greater and lesser ‘meatloaf’”. I think he prefers the traditional reckoning. Whereas in the ordinary Novus Ordo calendar we just throw the unconsumed “meatloaf” Sundays away, in the Church’s extraordinary calendar we conserve the left over Sundays in the back of the liturgical ice-box and pull them out later if needed.
Either way, as is the case with many things preserved lovingly in the refrigerator for a long time, these Sundays are green… with hope, of course.
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The use of the expression “Ordinary Time” could so easily have been avoided by introducing it to us as “Ordinal Time”.
Thanks, Father, this sorta answers a question I’ve had for a long time — how come one or two Sundays in Ordinary Time always seem to get “lost” in the liturgical year?
In the NO calendar (the only one I’m accustomed to) we usually get to about the 5th or 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time before Lent hits, then after Pentecost, Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi, the count starts up again with the 11th or 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time. I could never figure out what happened to the “missing” Sundays. I do know now that the weeks following the latter 3 feast days are actually counted as days in Ordinary Time, but that still leaves a couple of Sundays unaccounted for.
For me this was always a liturgical mystery comparable to “why is there no Channel 1 on TV” and “why are there always 10 hot dogs to a package but only 8 buns”.
A liturgy expert in England told me that we structure our Easter after the Rabbis (where and who-Italians?) decide what day Passover will fall upon, and that they meet every so many years and set this. Then, the Church fills out Her liturgical year. Is this true?
I love the green vestments. “Not only are they beautiful, but radiant.
Most of the Catholic world does not realize that there is a new liturgical season. And it seems that my diocese has been chosen as the test diocese to see how it works. We are naturally very excited to be able to serve the Church in this manner. I don’t know all the background and backroom debates preceding this decision, but it appears to be a wise choice by the Church to select our diocese because we are always ready to experiment with all things liturgical. In fact we are so much on the cutting edge that we often even try to anticipate what the Church SHOULD do.
The latest liturgical season will probably become officially known as Harvest season. If our parish is to be the model, then the season appears to begin on or immediately preceding Halloween. It seems that Ordinary time is so stifling to the creative genius of liturgists and liturgical environmentalist. Quite simply they are bored by Ordinary time. After all, why should the Celebration ever be boring.
I first noticed the onset of this season when I entered the church and noticed that the altar area was bedecked with a wild array of pumpkins, gourds, bales of hay, huge sacks of potatoes, corn stalks and even cornucopias. This was around Halloween, so obviously Halloween must be one of the high holy days of this season. Obviously, until some new Vatican document (maybe even a motu proprio!) is issued which affirms this new season, I am, of course, only speculating. But one must remember that our parish is very out in front on these things. So, it also appears that this liturgical season will culminate on what has already become one of the top high holy days in the Church (at least the American church – and what else really matters anyway?). That holy day is Thanksgiving. In fact I do think that more people attend Mass (or the Celebration) on this day than almost any other holy day – yes, even Christmas and Easter. So this is an obvious choice to culminate this season and a perfect lead-in to that tired old season of Advent.
There could be a problem when this holy day falls on, oh, lets say Thursday. There may be a dispensation or it could be moved to Sunday. But then not many people would go to the Celebration at all. This is a minor detail that can be worked out.
Other details are being worked on and sorted out. Liturgical color? No problem – obviously orange, preferably a burnt orange. I can’t wait to see these the new vestments. There will have to be a whole new set of songs and hymns for the season. See Marty Haugen, Dan Schutte, OCP, et al to get going on this. We’ve got a good start with what will probably become one of the featured headliner songs – Table of Plenty. There are bound to be a lot of others waiting to be incorporated as Harvest standby hymns. It’s an exciting time for the Church!!
Wow, you really went to town on that peco.
Is this what we want to describe our liturgical season ?
or·di·nar·y (ôrdn-r)
adj.
1. Commonly encountered; usual.
2.
a. Of no exceptional ability, degree, or quality; average.
b. Of inferior quality; second-rate.
Ordinary Time is what happens between more important, more solemn seasons (Easter, Christmas, Lent, Advent). I’m not sure that there’s anything superior about the old “22nd Sunday after Pentecost” method of describing the year. In either case there’s a whole raft of Sundays and weeks which are not exceptional in and of themselves.
I like the title “Sunday after Pentecost” myself, but I wish the Sundays after Epiphany were renamed when they fell after Pentecost.
Suprtradmom,
The Council of Nicea (325) set Easter as the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. (Spring is reckoned to begin on March 21 for ecclesiastical purposes.) So in the West, Easter can be anywhere between March 22 and April 25. The East reckons differently (although I can’t remember why), so sometimes they celebrate Easter on a different date. According to Wikipedia (which I believe is accurate on this), both East and West will celebrate Easter on April 24, 2011.
Alice – part of it is that the East reckons the equinox (the start of spring) according to the Julian calendar, so sometimes they’re looking at the full moon after ours. But how it sometimes comes to be one week out I don’t know.
What terms do the newer Latin books use where the English has Ordinary Time and Sundays of the Year? Is it still per annum?
@ uptoncp
Yes, the books for the current calendar use “Tempus Per Annum” for counting the Sundays outside of Advent, Lent, and Easter.
Bookworm,
Most years only have 33, not 34, weeks of ordinary time. Only if Advent starts relatively late is there time to squeeze in a 34th week. Nevertheless, by convention the last week of ordinary time is always called the 34th, with previous weeks being labeled the 33rd, 32nd, 31st, and so on back to Pentecost. Of course the week that begins after January 6 is always called the 1st, with the following weeks being labeled the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and so on. In practice, this means that 5 years out of 7 the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, or 9th week gets dropped.
However, never more than one WEEK gets dropped. However, several more SUNDAYS are usually dropped. It is common for the 1st Sunday of Ordinary Time to be replaced by Baptism of the Lord, or else sometimes by Epiphany where it gets moved to Sunday. The Ordinary Time Sunday after Pentecost is always replaced by Trinity Sunday. In some years St John the Baptist or Sts Peter and Paul replaces a Sunday around that time of year. In many places Corpus Christi replaces one of the Sundays soon after the resumption of Ordinary Time. So if you only go to Church on Sundays, the missing weeks of Ordinary time can seem to be more than just one.