Friday, January 7, 2011

Jan 9: Holy Family or Sunday after Epiphany?



This Sunday presents something of a liturgical oddity in the Benedictine calendar, in that the Sunday ends up being much less elaborate liturgically than it was before 1955, or is still in the 1962 Roman EF calendar. 

Once upon a time it would have been part of the Octave of Epiphany, and used the antiphons from that feast. 

In the Roman Extraordinary Form, this Sunday is the Feast of the Holy Family, a feast whose Gospel reading (the finding of the child Jesus in the Temple) provides something of a bridge between the Nativity and the Baptism of Our Lord (January 13).  

In the novus ordo, the feast was celebrated on the Sunday immediately after Christmas (where it really makes no sense chronologically at all!). 

But in the Benedictine calendar, the feast isn't celebrated at all - nor is this a '1962ism'.  In fact the Feast of the Holy Family is quite recent in origin, instituted only in 1893, and doesn't seem to have entered the monastic calendar at all as far as I can discover.  Instead, until 1955 at least, this was the Sunday within the Octave, and so the antiphons and so forth of Epiphany were used, in conjunction with - the same Gospel  as the Feast of the Holy Family!

But with the abolition of the Octave, the Sunday is of lower rank, and thus the standard antiphons of Sundays are used. 

Unless of course, you are associated with one of those monasteries that do actually celebrate the feast of the Holy Family (the feast has Canadian origins I believe), or are using the EF calendar...

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