Liturgical Season in Hiding
The Catholic Thing, 15 September 2024
Bespoke liturgical seasons permit the flourishing of a greater liturgical piety. Some options are hiding in plain sight.
Bespoke clothing is better than off-the-rack, but often rather too expensive. Bespoke liturgical seasons are free and permit the flourishing of a greater liturgical piety. And they can be observed or ignored according to taste.
What is a bespoke season? We might consider 15th September – feast of Our Lady of Sorrows – the conclusion of the “season of Mary,” which opened a month ago on the solemn feast of the Assumption. It’s not an official liturgical season. There are five of those, and they are fixed: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Ordinary Time.
But in prayer, preaching, and personal piety, why not observe a custom-made Marian season? The month does include two octaves: Assumption to Queenship (15th – 22nd August) and Nativity of Mary to Our Lady of Sorrows (8th – 15thSeptember).
The latter octave – which also includes the feast of the Holy Name of Mary (12thSeptember) – was not drawn up by liturgical authorities to be such, as clearly is the case with the former. Mary’s nativity was set because it falls nine months exactly after the Immaculate Conception (8th December). Our Lady of Sorrows follows the day after the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (14th September), which makes good sense. Thus they “accidentally” form an octave. Providentially perhaps. Or simply conveniently, according to taste.
The Latin calendar slogs through Ordinary Time in these months. Today falls the 24th Sunday – almost three-quarters the way through!
“Ordinary Time” is not inspiring, but in English it is a slight improvement over the Latin “per annum” – Sundays “through the year”. “Ordinary Time” itself is not the official name for the season, and there are alternative explanations of its emergence. The late Father Richard John Neuhaus favored calling it “well-Ordered time” – his own bit of bespokery.
“Ordinary” has the wrong connotation in English. The mysteries of salvation are never ordinary. When St. John Paul the Great added new mysteries to the Rosary covering the public life of Jesus, he did not call them the “ordinary” mysteries, but “luminous.”
The Latin liturgical tradition has “Sundays after Epiphany” and “Sundays after Pentecost”; the Anglicans go with “Sundays after Trinity.” It’s better than “through the year,” but is still somewhat weak, a kind of looking backward rather than seeing Providence in the present moment.
So, bespoke seasons have their appeal. Some options are hiding in plain sight. There are forty days between the Transfiguration (6th August) and the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, similar to the other great “forties” in the calendar – Christmas to the Presentation (2nd February); Lent; and Easter to Ascension Thursday.
My own parish is Holy Cross, so we mark those forty days as a season of the Cross, as it were, with a red altar frontal the entire time, pointing to the patronal feast to come.
The imagination suggests other possibilities. Last month the feasts of Jean Vianney (4th August) and Maximilian Kolbe (14th August), ten days apart, are a little season of the priesthood. The patron saint of parish priests goes first, and then is followed by the one whose last recorded words, explaining his oblation in Auschwitz, were, “I am a Catholic priest.”
Two other priest martyrs come to mind in these days, both of whom were martyrs for John Paul, in a manner of speaking. Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko carried the banner of Solidarity that was a fruit of the papal visit to Poland in 1979. For that, he was brutally killed by the communist secret police in 1984. Blessed Pino Puglisi was an anti-mafia priest in Palermo. After John Paul denounced the mafia during his visit to Sicily in May 1993, consequences followed. The Basilica of St. John Lateran, the Holy Father’s cathedral, was bombed in July, and mafia goons killed Puglisi in September.
Blessed Jerzy was born on 14th September. Blessed Pino on 15th September. Popieluszko’s feast day is 19thOctober. Puglisi’s is 21st October. John Paul himself falls on 22nd October. The two martyrs prepare for the papal feast day, the three of them together providing a triduum of heroic resistance next month.
There are so many possibilities. October offers a Teresian fortnight, with the Little Flower (1st October) and the grand Teresa (15th October) adorning the month.
October is jam-packed with saints, including St. Faustina (5th October) and St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (16thOctober), united across the centuries in spreading devotion to the merciful heart of Jesus.
St. John XXIII (11th October) called Vatican II, St. John Henry Newman (9thOctober) was the hidden council father, and St. John Paul II (22nd October) gave it a definitive interpretation.
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