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| Labor Day weekend seems so peaceful and pleasant, then you look more closely and hey... what's that coming around the bend? The Irresistible Force is headed for our Immovable Feasts. |
Easter is the classic example of a movable feast. It falls every year on a Sunday determined by astronomical considerations. This past Easter was rather late, April 20. Next Easter will fall in the normal range, April 5. That means Ash Wednesday (a movable fast?) will be relatively normal too, on February 18, 2026. Christmas, on the other hand, is always on December 25, and the annual question is what day of the week will that be? This year, the answer is Thursday.
Easter and Christmas are holy days of the highest rank and take precedence whenever they fall. Not all holy days that fall on the same date every year have the same weight as Christmas. Just this past weekend, the remarkably important Feast of Saint Bartholomew was rudely suppressed (that’s the official term for it) by the twenty-first Sunday in ordinary time, whose very name indicates how easy it would have been to live without it – but I may be somewhat biased in that judgment. So, everybody who is not a member of a church dedicated to Saint Bartholomew must wait until next August to celebrate the Guileless Apostle.
This year, however, we learn that rather like the animals on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, some feasts are more feasty than others. These feasts will outrank and even suppress a Sunday in ordinary time when they fall on the same date. For the first time since 2014, four specific immovable feasts this year fall on and supplant Sundays.
We already celebrated on Sunday June 29 the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, an enormously important feast of the universal Church. It came so soon after the end of all the movable feasts associated with Easter – Pentecost Sunday, Trinity Sunday, and Corpus Christi Sunday – that it did not seem out of the ordinary (time). But in just a few weeks, things will get noticeably strange.
On Sunday, September 14, instead of the twenty-fourth Sunday in ordinary time, we will celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which is an ancient commemoration of the discovery in Jerusalem and translation to Rome of the True Cross of Our Lord’s Passion by the Empress Helena. Its proper prayers are ancient and powerful; I especially like the preface.
Six weeks later on November 2, instead of the thirty-first Sunday in ordinary time, the Commemoration of All Souls will have us pray for our dear departed at all the Sunday Masses. The eleven o’clock Mass that Sunday will be our annual Requiem Mass for the souls of our parish who have died over the past year. Our choirs will provide the marvelous music of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, and we will invite the families who mourn them to return for the Mass.
The very next week, November ninth, we will celebrate the Dedication of the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, the cathedral church of the Bishop of Rome (and you thought it was Saint Peter in the Vatican, didn’t you?) conferred on the successor to Peter by the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century.
You who are extrapolating from these dates have figured out that All Saints’ Day, November first, is on a Saturday, which means that the obligation to attend Mass that day has been lifted by our gracious bishops. It also means Halloween will be on Friday; does that make for more mayhem, or just more candy? We shall see.
It also means that November 16, the thirty-third Sunday in ordinary time, will be the only green Sunday between Halloween and mid-January, because after that comes Christ the King, then Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, etc. Then we will have at least a month just to pull ourselves together before Lent starts.
Last year, one of my priest friends in the diocese across the river was so pleased with the dynamics of the days around Christmas that he wanted the Church to declare it will be on a Wednesday every year. I must admit, it was a pretty sweet arrangement. But Christmas is likely to stay on the twenty-fifth, since sometimes the holy day is best enjoyed when it is an immovable feast.
Monsignor Smith
