Summary
1 Time in human experience
1.1 The objective dimension and the subjective dimension of time
1.2 The “humanization” of time
2 Time in the Christian experience
2.1 Time in Sacred Scripture
2.2 Worship as a memorial
2.3 The liturgical understanding of time
2.3.1 The object of Christian celebration
2.3.2 In history, towards the fullness of the Kingdom
2.3.3 Circle, line, spiral
2.3.4 Year, month, day, and hour
3 The Christian liturgical year
4 The reform of Vatican II
4.1 The current structure of the liturgical year
4.1.1 The Christmas cycle or season
4.1.2 The Easter cycle or season
4.1.3 Ordinary Time
4.1.4 Other feasts of the liturgical year
4.2 The liturgical time as mystagogy of the Church
1 Time in human experience
Time is, above all, a fundamental and determining experience for human beings. Along with space, they are the two founding coordinates of their experience: we are and move in a place and in a becoming. Every human being is gestated, born, and lives, until their death, immersed in these two dimensions. From the protected, warm, and nurturing space of the maternal womb, drastically abandoned at birth to enter the vast space of the world, much less gentle than the mother’s breast, the human being transits, inhabits, and domesticates the natural space or the one they build for themselves to live in.
This happens analogously with time, which man experiences as a continuous evolution (a continuous becoming), with no backward movement, perceptible in the change, renewal, and aging of things and people, impossible to stop. “Muda, tudo muda” (Change, everything changes), says a well-known Latin American popular song, which expresses not only the experience of inevitable change but also that of the persistence of memory and human values.
Time is the experience that everything can be measured in terms of its duration. It gives the thinking being a past, a present, and a future, which is both individual and social. Time and space determine man as an individual and as a social being, simultaneously enabling and limiting his existence, which is radically spatio-temporal. Man cannot escape the reality of being situated in both dimensions, and can experience them as areas of freedom or, also, of limitation.
The experience of time is in the mind and emotions, more than in feelings. It is more difficult to grasp, define, measure, and control than space. It is an experience that awakens a sense of fragility, helplessness, and dependence on uncontrollable forces. Therefore, human beings have always sought to control, dominate, and overcome it, clashing with the objective impossibility of doing so, because it is like a mighty river that cannot be stopped. This experience leads to religious sentiment. Religion has the ability to tilt a frightening becoming in man’s favor, giving it meaning; or to build, through its rituality, the illusion of controlling and dominating it.
The first and most widespread action of controlling time by man is its measurement, and for this, he has the help of nature itself.
1.1 The objective dimension and the subjective dimension of time
There are rhythms that help human beings measure time. Among those belonging to human nature itself are the biological ones: the heartbeat and breathing are characteristics of their corporeality. Among those that man observes in nature are the cosmic ones, such as the daily path of the sun from east to west, the succession of day and night, the months determined by the phases of the moon, and the movement of the stars which, linked to the seasons of nature, determines the duration of a year.
Based on these natural rhythms, man created social rhythms such as the hour, the week, and the month, which, in their objective duration, have varied greatly from time to time and from culture to culture. The human being does not only need to measure time. He is also capable of generating a temporal horizon and distinguishing, in his consciousness, between the present moment, the past, and the future. This horizon depends on age and intellectual development and is determined by the social situation of each person. Similarly, the time horizon of a human group depends, among other factors, on its economic, social, and cultural development.
It is necessary to distinguish, therefore, between subjectively experienced time and objectively measured time. In both cases, it is about time for the human being, since its perception and measurement are closely linked to man’s consciousness and intelligence.
Objectively measured time can be determined by both biological and cosmic rhythms, as well as by measurement systems conceived by human beings. Subjectively experienced time, however, is determined by the events that result in personal or social human life. Any period of a person’s life is experienced as “short” or “long,” depending on whether it is fun or boring, important or trivial, happy or painful. Who does not experience the ten minutes of waiting in a bank line as endless, and the same ten minutes shared with a loved one as extremely short? Therefore, it is not time itself, but what happens in it, that determines the temporal experience.
1.2 The “humanization” of time
The human being tries to dominate the unstoppable flow of time through its measurement and organization. However, all forms of time measurement are based on a prior conception of it; these conceptions are basically two: the cyclical and the linear.
The cyclical one, graphically expressed by the circle, is typical of more archaic cultures, as its origin lies in the rhythms of nature. This explains why the categories of year, month, and day exist worldwide: they are easily graspable in everyday experience.
The linear form perceives time as a permanent becoming, without the possibility of going back, represented graphically by a line that always moves forward. Its measurement consists of segmenting this line into periods. In it, the objective, the “how far” the line goes, or where it ends, acquires fundamental importance. The Judeo-Christian tradition basically adheres to this conception of time.
The alternation of day and night is the most immediate pattern for measuring time. But the duration of light and darkness to which they are linked varies greatly from one region to another and from one season to another. Thus, human ingenuity invented instruments that measure the hours of the day, regardless of the light-dark factor: sundials, water clocks, and finally, only in the 14th century, the mechanical clock. This became widespread in the 19th century through the mass production of pocket and wrist watches. At the beginning of the 20th century, the temporal system was universalized by establishing Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the time standard, which favored the organization of time for an increasingly globalized world in the areas of production, transportation, and human mobility.
The month, on the other hand, is a complex unit. Despite having clear natural support in the phases of the moon, it is experienced as part of a larger segment, which is the year. However, the duration of the solar cycle, which we call a year, does not fit with the division into months based on the lunar cycle. This led to different solutions: the Islamic calendar adopted the lunar cycle, dividing the year into twelve lunar months, making it ten days shorter than the solar year; alternatively, the Julian calendar took the solar cycle as its base and standardized the twelve lunar cycles to fit within it.
The week is different from the day, month, and year, because it is not related to natural cycles, except in cultures where the seven-day week was imposed, which is almost a quarter of the lunar cycle’s duration of 29.5 days.
The week is of cultural origin. Therefore, in ancient times, it was different in various societies. In Mesopotamia and Israel, the week had seven days. The ancient Romans had an eight-day week, the Chinese a ten-day one, and in various cultures of West Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America, there were weeks of about three and six days. What was common to all of them was the ever-recurring pattern of certain days, probably to regulate certain repetitive activities, like market days. Many societies recognized, within the weekly system, a day of special relief, usually with a religious foundation: the Shabbat of Judaism, the Sunday of Christianity, and the Friday of Islam.
2 Time in the Christian experience
The human experience of time and its social organization are closely related to man’s religious consciousness. In all religions, time plays an important role, but the conception of time and the religious and cultic behavior towards it, which derive from this understanding, are very varied. The biblical and Christian liturgical conception is just one of them.
2.1 Time in Sacred Scripture
The biblical experience of time is the basis for the meaning that Christian liturgy attributes to it. The Christian God is the God-man, the God-with-us, the God who incarnates and assumes not only the beauty of his creation and his creatures, but also their limitations and conditionings. He is the God who became flesh, fragile, limited, and corruptible, located in the fundamental coordinates of time and space. This radically determines the liturgy, as does the paschal mystery of Christ, which represents the overcoming of all conditioning, including time: the Risen One introduces humanity into the new eternity, into a new time, which awaits his second coming, the definitive one.
In the Bible, an idea of time predominates that considers it the sphere of God’s action and the revelation of the divine plan in history. It is fundamentally a linear conception of time, with the exception of the book of Qoheleth, which introduces a cyclical and fatalistic conception, characteristic of the Hellenic world, whose culture dominated Palestine from the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC.
First of all, time in the Bible is the history of salvation. Time is the history in which God reveals his salvific project, manifests his will by calling concrete people, convenes and gathers a people of his own, permanently freeing them from slavery and sin, leading them to the fulfillment of his promises.
This promise is fully fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the irruption of God into human history, in the incarnation and in his historical life. This irruption, the favorable day of salvation, does not end with the human life of Jesus of Nazareth, but inaugurates the definitive eternity, the time of fullness that only awaits its consummation in the Parousia, the definitive coming of the glorious Christ. The concept of the ‘kingdom’ of God, inaugurated by Jesus Christ, is a temporal concept and not precisely a geographical one. It is equivalent to the ‘reign’ of God, that is, to the establishment of his sovereignty. Jesus affirmed that this reign was already in the midst of his people because of his saving interventions (Lk 11:20). His own irruption into history was already the beginning of the reign, and the resurrection from the dead opened the door to definitive time, thus casting the line towards the consummation of his eschatological coming.
2.2 Worship as a memorial
In this idea of time, worship acquires a particular meaning. The great annual festivals of the Old Testament, which in their origin were cyclical nature feasts, were historicized. Their original content was replaced by God’s saving actions in history. The festivities were transformed into memorial feasts, which recalled salvific facts from the past. Through words and ritual actions, these events updated (made present) God’s salvation and, at the same time, promised definitive salvation for the future.
The ritual became a memorial sign of what had happened at some point, an expression of fidelity to divine precepts, and a sign of hope in the future fulfillment of God’s promise. It is his fidelity that updates in the present the salvation already accomplished and promises it for the future.
This understanding of time and of cultic action throughout it is found both in the liturgy of the synagogue and in the liturgy of our Christian Church.
2.3 The liturgical understanding of time
Time is God’s work and belongs to Him, like everything He created. God exists from everlasting to everlasting, that is, outside of time and not subject to its domain. God’s “time” is called eternity. He is the author, creator, and lord of time.
In time, human life unfolds, becoming aware of its becoming, making history out of it. Christianity is a historical religion. Its liturgy is also historical, in a dual sense: it celebrates the history and is celebrated in history.
2.3.1 The object of Christian celebration
What, precisely, of history does our liturgy celebrate? The main focus of Christian liturgy is the paschal mystery of Christ, that is, the historical events of his death and resurrection. They constitute the apex and articulation of Christian time. In the liturgy, we celebrate a God who, according to revelation, is not only the creator of all that exists, but also manifests himself by liberating and saving man in history, because he himself became the history of salvation.
The liberating interventions of God in the history of salvation—past, present, and future—are concentrated in the Christ event, in his paschal mystery. And it is precisely this paschal mystery that the Church always celebrates in all liturgies. As the paschal mystery is the synthesis of the history of salvation, the liturgy is its privileged “moment,” its actualization. It celebrates this history to the extent that it is filled with God’s liberating interventions, before and after the incarnation. It celebrates not only the death and resurrection of Christ, but his entire life—the earthly, the pre-existent, and the glorious—his message, and his own salvific acts.
2.3.2 In history, towards the fullness of the Kingdom
The liturgy is celebrated in history. It is not a timeless action; it does not intend to “overcome” time. It is not celebrated with its back to history, but immersed in real history, because it updates the past salvific irruptions of God in the present history, which is also the continuation of the history of salvation.
Christian liturgy, therefore, does not intend to either overcome or dominate time, but rather, within it—which is the setting for the history of salvation—it “rebirths” the real history of human beings, submerging it in the mystery of Christ so that believers may celebrate the liberating interventions of God as a permanent day of salvation: the today of the paschal mystery that becomes present in the concrete life of the Church.
2.3.3 Circle, line, spiral
In the liturgy, the three tenses that distinguish our consciousness come together: the past, with all its richness of God’s interventions; the present, with the concrete and determining circumstances of the celebrating assembly; and the future, as the eschatological goal that mobilizes the hope and commitment of Christians: “We announce your death, we proclaim your resurrection. Come, Lord Jesus!”, we say in the acclamation after the account of the institution of the Eucharist. The liturgy is celebrated in the tension of a line that advances towards the definitive encounter with the Lord of history.
In Christian liturgical time, there is a synthesis of the two great systems of temporal organization, the cyclical and the linear. It is organized around the natural cycles of the day, the month, and the year and, above all, as the Second Vatican Council emphasized, around the cultural-religious cycle of the seven-day week, with Sunday as the main day. The Western world, influenced by Christianity, determined the beginning of its calendar, year zero, according to the birth of Jesus Christ. Today, thanks to studies that have corrected past calculations, we know that the birth of Jesus was, in fact, between the years 4 and 7 before year 0.
According to the cyclical conception, the Christian liturgy is ordered by the hours of the day, in the weekly sequence marked by Sunday, and in the year, which receives various names: “liturgical year,” “ecclesial year,” “year of the Lord.” To distribute the richness of the Bible in the readings of the various celebrations, the liturgical time has been organized, since the reform of the Second Vatican Council, in a three-year cycle: A, B, and C. The Liturgy of the Hours organizes the biblical texts of the Office of Readings in a two-year cycle, Even and Odd. The universal Church has established a jubilee year every 50 years. All these patterns repeat cyclically, one unit after another, without change. They represent the continuity of the cyclical conception in liturgical time.
At the same time, the underlying tension of liturgical time is clearly constituted by a linear understanding: the Church, the people of God born from the Passover of Christ, journeys towards the “end of time,” to the fullness of the Kingdom of God that will be definitively installed at the second coming of Christ: the Parousia.
From the synthesis of the circle and the line emerges the most appropriate image of the time of the Church, which is the liturgical time: the upward spiral. It contains both the circular movement of cycles that repeat without change, and the linear movement of history that advances without ever turning back. Each turn of the spiral simultaneously repeats and renews, returns to itself and moves towards what has never been traversed before. What is repeated in the liturgical year, in fact, is never repeated as in the previous cycle, but always on a higher level, in a new and different context, because the world and humanity, Christians and those who celebrate are not the same as a year before, nor even a month, a week, or a day before. Although everything in the liturgy is repeated, it is also always new, because the world and humanity “change, everything changes.”
2.3.4 Year, month, day, and hour
As in civil society, the main unit of liturgical time is the “year,” although it is a particular “year” whose beginning and end do not coincide chronologically with the civil year. Its value is theological, not organizational. It is not defined as a mere temporal magnitude, but as a symbol of a supernatural reality. For Christianity, it is the analogy of a spiritual reality much deeper than the cosmological data of one turn of the Earth around the sun. It has deep biblical roots, crystallized in the expressions “year of Yahweh’s favor” (Is 61:2), “the year of the Lord’s favor” (Lk 4:19), “the fullness of time” (Gal 4:4; Eph 1:10), “the Kingdom of Heaven” (Mt 3:2).
The Christian foundation of the year is the Lord Jesus Christ himself. The year of the Lord’s favor is the time of Christ’s presence that lasts forever. The liturgical year is the symbol of the definitive eternity inaugurated by Jesus Christ with his resurrection and, for this reason, it becomes a symbol of the full life of the resurrected one.
The liturgy, by celebrating the paschal mystery of Christ throughout the years, months, weeks, days, and hours, paschalizes time, placing it explicitly in the line of salvation history. In other words, it sanctifies it.
In the course of the day, the Church celebrates the Eucharist and the Liturgy of the Hours. With the Liturgy of the Hours, the Church sanctifies the moments of the beginning and end of the day – sunrise and sunset – with the prayers of Lauds and Vespers, which it considers “the two hinges on which the Daily Office turns” – and the main hours, and also midday or the intermediate time, with the minor hours of Terce, Sext, and None. It adds the Office of Readings and a brief prayer – Compline – before the night’s rest.
The week is marked mainly by Sunday, which is the first feast of Christians, as Vatican II emphasized. The weekly rhythm represents the sanctification of liturgical time most evidently. The weekly Easter is the fundamental sequence of Christian liturgical time.
The year is clearly organized in the Roman calendar, which was entirely reformed by the Second Vatican Council. The biblical and liturgical concept of a “holy year” was incorporated into the Church in the custom of regularly instituting, every 25 years, and also on the occasion of some extraordinary event, a festive year with this name.
3 The Christian liturgical year
Christian liturgical time took concrete shape, as part of the liturgy and as a concrete organization of the various celebrations, as a “liturgical year.” This was not created or developed from theory, but was formed from the practice of celebrating and deepening the theological truths of Christians in various places. It established, from the beginning, distinct uses and differences, which were partly unified later to affirm the communion of the Church and partly maintained, some of them to this day, as distinct practices within the ecclesial communion. For example, the Eastern Churches, even those in communion with Rome, celebrate Easter, the main Christian feast, on a different date from the Roman Catholic one. And the same thing happens with other dates and liturgical times.
How was it in the beginning? Starting from the weekly Eucharist – the first Christians celebrated every “eighth day,” which we now call Sunday (from dominica dies, “day of the Lord”) – and the annual Easter (celebration of the Easter of the Resurrection once a year), a rich cycle of celebrations developed throughout the year.
The Christian churches of the first centuries, subjected for long periods to the persecutions of the Roman Empire, began to venerate their martyrs, who gave their lives and shed their blood for the sake of the gospel, thus participating in the paschal mystery of the Lord. The annual recurrence of the date of these deaths gave rise to what we call the “martyrology,” that is, the list of all the saints we venerate in the liturgy. The martyrology is permanently enriched through the beatification and canonization of new men and women, as happened recently with Monsignor Oscar Romero of El Salvador (canonized on October 14, 2018, in Rome).
In the fourth century, the feast of the birth of Jesus emerged, as a logical consequence of the attention given to his entire life and work, from the moment of his conception and birth. In the subsequent centuries, other events in the life of Jesus acquired the status of liturgical feasts. In the same century, the figure of Mary entered the liturgy with great force, as theology and spirituality defined and deepened her essential role in the history of salvation.
Since the Council of Trent in the 16th century, the liturgical year, like the entire liturgy, was formed in all its fundamental structures, which remained without major changes until the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Vatican II was preceded by more than a century of scientific liturgical studies, which gradually questioned a series of aspects of the liturgy that would be profoundly reformed from the second half of the 20th century.
4 The reform of Vatican II
Since the Second Vatican Council, we have a liturgical year that is much renewed from the past. The enormous number of obligatory feasts of saints that had accumulated throughout history gradually led to the loss of the centrality of Christ’s paschal mystery and the importance of Sunday. The awareness of the fundamental importance of Sacred Scripture for the faith and catechesis of the Church made it necessary to rethink its presence in the liturgy. The same can be said of the use of the vernacular languages of each country or human group, a key to understanding and, above all, to the more active participation of the people in the celebration. The participation of the assembly was one of the main issues of the reform, which conceived the liturgy not as a sacred function that the faithful attend passively, listening and repeating pre-defined gestures, but as a feast of the people of God, presided over by Christ himself in his ministers, and characterized by the active participation of the entire liturgical assembly, each according to their condition and function, and with greater spontaneity and presence of the concrete life of the faithful.
Taking into account these and other aspects that urgently needed reform, the Council renewed the liturgy and the liturgical year in a profound way. It re-evaluated the centrality of Sunday, the celebration of the “weekly Easter,” and the fundamental rhythm of the liturgical year. Another great richness of the reform is the renewed presence of the Bible in the celebrations. For the Eucharist on Sundays, a three-year cycle was developed, during which readings from the entire Bible were distributed, allowing communities to become familiar with the foundations of Sacred Scripture in that period.
4.1 The current structure of the liturgical year
The current organization of the liturgical year has “seasons” and celebrations for the universal Church. In the Catholic Church, it begins with the First Vespers of the First Sunday of Advent (that is, on the Saturday after the feast of Christ the King, in the afternoon). The date of this day is not fixed but changes slightly every year. Since there are four Sundays of preparation for Christmas, one counts back from the last Sunday before December 25 to determine the date of the first Sunday of Advent. It is always between the last days of November and the first days of December. With Advent, the Christmas cycle begins (also called the cycle of the Lord’s Manifestation), which continues until the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, on the first Sunday after January 6.
The second season is Ordinary Time, which begins after the feast of the Baptism of Jesus and extends until the beginning of Lent, a time of preparation for the Easter of the resurrection. This date is not fixed either, as it is determined by the date of Easter, established based on the lunar calendar, not the solar one: Easter is always on the first Sunday following the full moon after the spring equinox. It oscillates between March 22 and April 25.
Then the Easter cycle begins, which consists of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, culminating with the solemnity of Pentecost.
On the Monday after Pentecost, Ordinary Time resumes and lasts until the Saturday after the solemnity of Christ the King. Ordinary Time has 33 or 34 weeks and is the longest of the liturgical year. With the first Vespers on the Sunday following that feast, a new liturgical year begins.
4.1.1 The Christmas cycle or season
This cycle or season, the second in importance in the liturgical year, is also called the “cycle of the Lord’s manifestation,” because we celebrate Christ who reveals himself to us in his manifestations in human history. It is organized around the second great feast of the Lord, Christmas, which celebrates his birth in Bethlehem.
The “incarnation” of God, his becoming “flesh” or a human person, is the necessary condition for him to historically be able to live and die. The paschal mystery was possible because God became human. This cycle begins the Church’s liturgical year, on the first Sunday of Advent. Its main moments are:
– the four Sundays of Advent, which constitute the preparation for Christmas and make us sensitive to the hope of the Lord’s definitive coming;
– Christmas, the feast of the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem;
– the Octave of Christmas, similar to that of Easter, which continues the feast for a whole week; it inaugurates the “Christmas season,” which lasts until the beginning of Ordinary Time;
– the feast of the Holy Family, on the Sunday after Christmas;
– the day of the Octave, January 1st and the beginning of the civil year in much of the world, celebrating the solemnity of Saint Mary, Mother of God;
– the Epiphany, on January 6 or on the second Sunday after Christmas, which recalls the manifestation of the newborn to all nations, represented by the magi from the east;
– the Baptism of the Lord, on the Sunday after the Epiphany, which commemorates the beginning of his messianic ministry, thus manifesting himself to his people, Israel. With this feast, the “Christmas season” ends and the first week of “Ordinary Time” begins.
4.1.2 The Easter cycle or season
The cycle, or season, of Easter is the most important of the liturgical year, because at its center is the main Christian feast, the Easter of the Resurrection. The cycle begins on Ash Wednesday, with Lent, a time of conversion and reflection that lasts 40 days and is oriented towards preparation for Easter. At the end of Lent comes Holy Week, the most intense of the liturgical year, whose most important days are:
– Palm Sunday, when it begins and commemorates the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem before dying and rising;
– Holy Thursday, on which the bishop’s “Chrism Mass” is celebrated with all his collaborators in the ministry (priests and deacons) and the oils are blessed for the baptisms, confirmations, anointings of the sick, and ordinations of the year (there are dioceses where this mass is moved to another day of Holy Week); and, on the night of Holy Thursday, the Lord’s Supper in which we celebrate the institution of the Eucharist and the ordained priesthood;
– Good Friday, the day on which we remember the Lord’s death; it is the only day of the year on which the Eucharist is not celebrated (for this reason we receive communion with hosts consecrated on Holy Thursday);
– Holy Saturday, which culminates at night with the Easter Vigil;
– and the Sunday celebration of the resurrection.
The celebration of the resurrection is prolonged in the Octave of Easter, until the following Sunday, as “a single feast day.” It continues, moreover, for the entire Paschal fifty days or Eastertide, which are the fifty days that culminate with the feast of the Holy Spirit, Pentecost. On the 40th day, the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord is celebrated, which in many countries is transferred to the following Sunday, which is the one before Pentecost.
4.1.3 Ordinary Time
In all the time that falls outside the two great preceding cycles, which lasts for 33 or 34 weeks, no particular aspect of the paschal mystery is celebrated, but rather the mystery of Christ and his Church as a whole. Sundays are its main days; every seven days the feast of the resurrection occurs for Christians. A smaller part of these Sundays, between 5 and 9, is found after the cycle of the manifestation, starting from the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, and the rest are after the Sunday of Pentecost, until the Saturday before the first Sunday of Advent.
As for the Gospel reading, the evangelist Luke was designated for year A, the evangelists Mark and John for year B, and the evangelist Matthew for year C. Every three years, the cycle restarts, giving us the possibility of a new passage through the most important books and texts for our faith. In Ordinary Time, Sundays and weekdays are the reason for the celebration, especially the lectionary. With the readings of years A, B, and C, its unity is given, which is not broken by being divided into two parts.
4.1.4 Other feasts of the liturgical year
In Ordinary Time, the Church places a series of other important festivities, among which many feasts of the Virgin and the saints stand out, although these are also distributed throughout the year and can be in the cycles of the manifestation and Easter. The most important events are the following.
In relation to Jesus Christ: Presentation of the Lord (February 2, in fact, it enters the complex of the festivities of the manifestation); Exaltation of the Cross (September 14 or May 3); Most Holy Trinity (Sunday after Pentecost; celebrates the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit); Corpus Christi (Body and Blood of Christ; second Thursday after Pentecost); Sacred Heart of Jesus (third Friday after Pentecost); Transfiguration of the Lord (August 6); Christ the King (last Sunday of the liturgical year, that is, before the first day of Advent).
In relation to the Virgin Mary: Annunciation of the Lord (March 25: nine months before the birth); Assumption of Mary (August 15); Immaculate Conception (December 8); Immaculate Heart of Mary (third Saturday after Pentecost); and many special invocations, such as Our Lady of Lourdes (February 11), Our Lady of Fatima (May 13), and, especially in Latin America, the Marian continent par excellence, whose countries venerate the Virgin Mary as patroness in various invocations: Our Lady of Guadalupe (patroness of Latin America, December 12), Our Lady of Aparecida (October 12), Virgin of Luján (May 8), Our Lady of Mount Carmel (July 16) and many others.
In relation to the saints: All Saints (November 1), Saint Joseph (March 19) and Saint Joseph the Worker (May 1), Saint John the Baptist (June 24), Saint Peter and Saint Paul (June 29) and others proper to each country. The large number of men and women who have been canonized since the pontificate of Saint John Paul II is due to the desire to enrich the particular calendars with local male and female saints, in addition to those of the universal calendar.
There are still many other feasts of the Virgin Mary and the saints. They are often more linked to personal devotion or to some regions. For its importance to many Catholics, we must also remember the Commemoration of All the Dead (All Souls’ Day, November 2), a day of great attendance at cemeteries.
Communion is not uniformity, but unity in the richness of diversity. For this reason, the liturgical year becomes local in each particular Church, through its own celebrations and feasts.
The celebrations have their own colors, which are used in liturgical vestments and other signs/symbols in the celebration space: green for Ordinary Time, both on Sundays and on feasts and weekdays; red for Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and the feasts of the apostles and martyrs; purple for Advent, Lent, and celebrations for the deceased; and white for Easter, Christmas, and the other solemnities and feasts of Christ and the Virgin Mary. In various places, the color blue has been popularized for the feasts of the Virgin. The meaning of the colors is conventional and can change from culture to culture: red for passion, apostles, and martyrs who gave their blood, like Jesus Christ, for the gospel. White, the color par excellence of holiness and purity, for the great solemnities of the year and for the feasts of the Virgin. Purple, originally a penitential color, of remembrance and conversion, for the times of preparation and for the celebrations of the death of Christians. Green, the most common color, for normal time.
4.2 The liturgical year as mystagogy of the Church
The liturgical year is not a mere organization of the Church’s liturgical celebrations in time. Much more than a simple structure, it is actually a mystagogy of the Church, that is, a formative itinerary that introduces the mystery of Christ and leads to an ever-deeper understanding of the gospel and of all Christian doctrine and, therefore, to a growth in the commitment of the faithful to their faith.
The entire richness of the mystery of Christ is commemorated: his birth, his life, his passion, death, and resurrection, his words and acts, his Mother Mary, the effects of his message on so many witnesses and martyrs through the biblical readings, the richness and beauty of the liturgical texts elaborated by the Church, the experience of celebrating in community and actively participating in celebrations, of singing and dialoguing in fraternal environments, of experiencing the challenges to which the Lord calls us from the celebration of faith; all this is a unique path of growth and deepening of the Christian life for all the faithful.
Living the development of the liturgical year consciously, not just for one year, but for the three years of the Sunday cycle, allows us to traverse the foundations of Christian revelation through the biblical readings, and also helps to generate, in the Church, authentic communion in diversity and, in each Christian, the awareness of a faith and a commitment that are not static. They are authentic “histories of salvation” lived in the evolution of time, always challenged to a greater fidelity to the gospel and always attracted by the hope of the Kingdom, the apex of time and of the liturgical year.
Guillermo Rosas. Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Original text in Spanish.
References
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CALENDARIA PARTICULARIA, Instrucción de la Sagrada Congregación para el Culto divino, 24 junio 1970.
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