Showing posts with label Our Lady. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Our Lady. Show all posts

Friday, March 18, 2011

March 19: St Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Class I


Saturday is a class I feast, so the Lenten day is only commemorated. 

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

February 2: Candlemas, aka Purification of Our Lady, Class II


Candlemas, aka The Purification of Our Lady, aka the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, is celebrated 40 days after Christmas, the traditional date for the ceremonies of purification after childbirth in Jewish law that were translated over into Catholic tradition as the rites for the churching of women.

In Jewish tradition women were ritually impure after childbirth; in Catholic tradition the ceremony is a thanksgiving for survival of childbirth, and a blessing for the future. In both cases it was no doubt a practical measure in part, to allow the mother to recover before having to resume her normal duties including attending worship! These days of course the idea is considered ideologically unsound, so the feast has been renamed the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple (which was certainly part of the traditional ceremonies, albeit the part supplanted by infant baptism).

The popular name for the feast comes from the ceremony held on the day whereby the candles to be used for the year ahead are blessed.

The Gospel for the day, Luke 2, describes the events, and gives us the Nunc Dimittis, Simeon's canticle used at Compline in the Roman Rite.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

January 15: The Office of Our Lady on Saturday after Christmas

Though Christmastide is now technically over, as Dom Gueranger points out in his Liturgical Year, the older tradition is that the season conceived more broadly extends for the forty days Our Lady spent in contemplation after the birth of Our Lord, until her re-entry to the Temple at the Feast of the Purification on February 2. 

This is reflected liturgically in Marian antiphon and prayers at Compline and in the Office of Our Lady on Saturday where the psalm antiphons of the Nativity continue to be used until February 2.

Here is a setting of the Lauds antiphon (albeit with a few extra alleluias):

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...