Understanding the calendar Part IVC - Local feasts and alternative calendars

In the last couple of posts in this series on the calendar I have looked at how to incorporate feasts of the General calendar into the Office.

But as well as the generally applying feasts, there are a number of local feasts, feasts of the 'particular churches' that you need to take account of in the Office.

Local feasts

In particular, the rubrics allow for the following feasts to be added to the General Calendar:

• principal patron of the country, region or province as a Class I;
• principal patron of the diocese or territory;
• anniversary of the dedication of the Cathedral of the diocese;
• patron of the town or city;
• anniversary of the dedication of the church;
• titular feast of the church;
• patron saint of the congregation or monastery;
• feast of the monasteries founder (if canonised or beatified); and
• saints specified in the calendar of the monastery's congregation.

The need to customise your Ordo to incorporate the list of feasts above explains why even monasteries that use the 1962 General Calendar and books won't have identical calendars.

Similarly, each Oblate should add the relevant local feasts to their own Ordo.

In some cases these saints may not appear in the General Calendar at all.  In others, the effect of the local feast may be to elevate the level of the feast.

Where local feasts coincide with the feasts of other saints in the General Calendar, or with Sundays you will need to resolve the conflict between them.

Generally speaking, memorials are displaced by Class I&II feasts but can be celebrated in conjunction with Class III feasts; other conflicts are resolved using 'the two tables' at the front of the Diurnal.

If two feasts of the same rank conflict, there is a hierarchy of types of feasts that dictates which one is celebrated.

Alternative calendars

The Ordo I provide on this blog covers the feasts set out in the 1962 General Calendar and the Sunday cycle associated with it (which is very similar to the Roman EF Sunday cycle and calendar).

Not all monasteries who say the traditional form of the Office, though, use the 1962 General Calendar for Benedictines, as the other officially approved option is to use the revised Calendar of 1975 in conjunction with the traditional Office books and either the 1962 or 1970 calendar cycles.

This approach, however, require a lot of adaptation and supplementation of the printed chant books, and personally I'm an advocate for keeping things simple.

But if your monastery does adopt this approach, it may provide its own Ordo to Oblates, and there are a number of books around aimed at providing the supplementary texts necessary (such as the Clear Creek books available from Lulu).

Working out how to say a (local) feast

Finally, by way of a summary of what we have covered so far, a quick look at how to actually find the texts for the local feasts you have added to the calendar.

In many cases, working out how to say a local feast is fairly straightforward: texts for a number of additional feasts are included as a supplement at the back of the Diurnal, more can be found in other readily downloadable chant books such as the Antiphonale Monasticism, and your particular monastery may be wiling to provide you with the relevant texts.

But if you can't find any specific texts for a particular feast, you simply use the 'Commons' of the particular type of saint (to be found in the Diurnal and other Office books).

The general principles of how a feast impacts on the hours are summarised in the tables below.  Note though that there are exceptions to the rules!

LEVEL OF FEAST	EFFECT ON MATINS
Class III feast	Invitatory antiphon and hymn of the feast (or from the appropriate Common); reading (3) and responsory of the feast; chapter and collect of the (type of) feast.
Class I or II feast	Three Nocturns, with invitatory antiphon, hymn, antiphons, psalms, readings, responsories, Gospel and collect of the feast.

LEVEL OF FEAST	EFFECT ON PRIME
Memorial	Nil
Class I, II or III feasts	Antiphon of the feast (the default is antiphon 1 of Lauds) either specific to the feast or from the Common

   

LEVEL OF FEAST	EFFECT ON TERCE, SEXT AND NONE
Memorial	Nil
Class I, II or III feast	Antiphon, chapter, versicle, collect of the feast

LEVEL OF FEAST	EFFECT ON VESPERS	EFFECT ON LAUDS
Memorial	Nil.	After Collect of the day, say the canticle antiphon, versicle and collect of the memorial
Class III without proper antiphons	Psalms and antiphons of the day; chapter, responsory, hymn etc from the Common
Class III with proper antiphons	Psalms of Sunday or the Common; antiphons of the feast; chapter etc for the feast (from the proper of the feast or the Common)	Festal Psalms  (under Sunday) – Ps 92, 99, 62; Option of using festal canticle of the day of the week; chapter etc for the feast (from the proper of the feast or the Common)
Class II	All for the feast (or from the Common of Saints or season), including psalms of feast, Sunday or Common	Festal psalms; option of festal canticle; Chapter etc of feast, season or common
Class I	All for the feast (or from the Common of saints or season) with I Vespers the night before	Festal psalms; option of festal canticle; Chapter etc of feast, season or common

In the next post I'll move onto the most confusing of the calendar cycles, that of the calendar months.