Understanding the calendar VIB - The liturgical seasons

In the last post we started looking at the cycle of 'movable feasts' that depend on the date of Easter.

Today a look a look at the key seasons and feasts of the year that are dependent on the Easter cycle.

Easter as the focus of the liturgical year

We are used to thinking of Advent as the start of the liturgical year, but in reality the liturgical year cycle originally centred on Easter, which was the first of all the feasts celebrated by the Church.

In fact Advent only became firmly established as the start of the year in the thirteenth century - indeed in the form given to it by St Gregory the Great in Rome in the late sixth century, Advent had a rather eschatological character, as indeed did the season of Epiphanytide as it developed over the seventh and eighth centuries.

Easter

The calculation of the date of Easter each year has been a source of controversy from the earliest years of the Church, with competing dates still celebrated by Orthodox and Catholics.

Even in the modern Western calendar, though, Easter remains the anchor for most of the liturgical year, with the date of many other feasts and special days, including Ash Wednesday, Ascension, Pentecost, The Most Trinity, Corpus Christi, and the Lent and Pentecost Ember Days, dependent on it.

You can read about the way it is calculated here.

For practical purposes, though, it is worth knowing that Easter can never occur before March 22 or later than April 25.

And for a list of the actual dates, consult the 'table of movable feasts' in the front of your Diurnal.

Counting backwards from Easter (1) - Septuagesima 

For Ordo purposes, it is easiest to think of the Sunday cycle as starting with the lead up seasons to Easter rather than Advent.

The traditional calendar has two pre-Easter seasons.

The first, Septuagesimatide, consists of the three weeks before Lent.

It's Sundays - Septaugesima (the ninth before Easter), Sexagesima (eighth before Easter) and Quinquagesima (seventh before Easter) can be traced back to the sixth century.

It was abolished in the 1970 calendar, but was retained in the 1962 calendar to provide a clear end point to the festive season, and soften the transition to Lent.

In the Office it is marked in several key ways:

• the Alleluia not used, with an alternative formula used in the opening prayers of the hours;
• the Scriptural reading cycle at Matins starts at the beginning of the Bible, with Genesis; 
• the collect of the Sunday is used each day at Matins and Lauds and Terce to Vespers, unless displaced by a feast; and 
• there are Magnificat antiphons at Vespers for each day of the week.

The rest of the Office though, remains as for 'throughout the year' during this time, with the ordinary days of the week being Class IV, and the Sundays Class II.

Counting backwards from Easter (2) - Lent

Like Septuagesima Sunday, the start of Lent - Ash Wednesday, a Class I 'day' - is also calculated by counting back the number of days/weeks from Easter.

In the Office, Lent has several phases:

• the days after Ash Wednesday but before the first Sunday of Lent, which are Class III days each with their own canticle antiphons and collects (one for Matins, Lauds, and Terce to None; another for Vespers), but otherwise continues to use the 'throughout the year' texts';
• from the First Sunday of Lent up to 'First' Passion Sunday, where each Sunday is Class I, and the 'Ordinary' of Lent provides the antiphons, hymns and other texts for the hours during the week';
• the two weeks of Passiontide (up to Palm Sunday) which has its own 'Ordinary' texts;
• Monday to Wednesday of Holy Week, which are Class I days with their own antiphons and special texts.  No other feasts can be celebrated during Holy Week; and
• the Sacred Triduum, where a special form of the Roman Office us used for Maundy Thursday to Holy Saturday.

During Lent, Class III feasts that occur on weekdays are reduced to commemorations.

The first week of Lent also includes the first set of 'Ember Days' of the year.

You can read more on the Office during Lent here for the period up to Passiontide, here for Passiontide, and here for Holy Week.

Counting forward from Easter (1) - the Easter Octave to the Octave of Pentecost

The feast of Easter itself is celebrated for seven days, by virtue of its Octave, all of the days of which are considered Class I of Our Lord, and so preclude the celebration of any other feasts.

This means that any first class feasts that occur in this period are transferred to the next available date.

In the modern calendar, the Scriptural number symbolism of Christ's ascension on the fortieth day after Easter (always a Thursday) has subverted in many places by shifting the feast to the Sunday.

In the 1962 calendar though, the Office is governed by the 'ordinary of Eastertide' up to the fortieth day after Easter, and then the ordinary of 'Ascensiontide' for the days up to the fiftith day after Easter, the Feast of Pentecost.

Like Easter, Pentecost also has a Class I Octave when no other feasts can be celebrated.

Counting forward from Easter (2) - Sundays and feasts after the Octave of Pentecost

The first Sunday after the Octave of Pentecost, the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, marks the start of a new cycle of feasts and Sundays tied to the date of Easter.

Apart from Trinity Sunday, these include Corpus Christi (the Thursday after Trinity Sunday) and the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus (Friday after the Second Sunday after Pentecost).

The Sundays after the Octave of Pentecost are Class II, and are numbered for their distance from that feast, and mark the start of a new cycle of readings at Matins.

For the first weeks after Pentecost (ie up to August), those readings centre on the books of Kings.

From August, though, the monthly reading cycle cuts in and means that the I Vespers Magnificat canticle, the First and Second Nocturn readings for Matins, and the responsories for Matins are determined by the week of the calendar month.

The collect of the week though, as well as the Third Nocturn and Gospel readings for Matins, collects for the week and Sunday canticle antiphons are determined by the number of the Sunday after the Octave of Pentecost.

This means you need to look in two different parts of your 'of the time' section of the Diurnal to find the texts you need each week.

The last Sundays after Pentecost, and Epiphanytide

The final twist to the annual cycle that you need to be aware of is the variable number of Sundays after Pentecost (and Epiphany).

There are twenty-four sets of texts for the Sundays after Pentecost, and six for the Sundays after Epiphany.

But if you consult the table of movable feasts in the Diurnal, you will find that, depending on the date of Easter, there can actually be anything between twenty three and twenty eight Sundays after the Octave of Pentecost.

This happens because Septuagesima can cut short the cycle of six Sundays after Epiphany, while the start of Advent (determined by the date of the Sunday nearest to November 30) can push the start of Advent back as far as November 27 or forward as far as December 3.

The pragmatic solution is to use the Sunday readings, canticle antiphons and collects not used earlier in the year during Epiphanytide to fill in the gap if necessary.

The formula for which Epiphanytide Sunday's texts are used after Pentecost depends on the number of Sundays in that particular year:

• if there are 25 Sundays after Pentecost, the 24th uses the texts for the 6th Sunday after Epiphany;
• if there are 26, the 24th is the 5th after Epiphany, the 25th is the 6th;
• if there are 27,  the 24th is 4th after Epiphany, and so forth; and 
• if there are 28, the 24th is 3rd after Epiphany.

The texts for the 'twenty-fourth' Sunday are always used on the last last Sunday of the liturgical year, no matter what number that Sunday is in any particular year.

In summary....

The table below summarises the level of days (feasts aside) for the key liturgical seasons of the year.

Season	Start/date  determined by	Sundays	Weekdays
Septuagesimatide	Easter	Class II	Class IV
Lent and Passiontide	Easter	Class I	Class III (Class III feasts commemorations only; if a Class I&II feast displaces, commemoration of the Lent day at Lauds and Vespers)
Holy Week and Easter Octave	Easter	Class I	Class I
Eastertide and Ascensiontide	Easter	Class II	Class IV (Vigil of the Ascension, Class II, Ascension Class I)
Octave of Pentecost	Easter	Class I	Class I
Weeks after the Octave of Pentecost	Easter	Class II	Class IV
Advent	Sunday nearest to 30 November	Class I	Class III to 16 December (if Advent day displaced by a Class I, II or III feast, commemoration at Lauds and Vespers); Class I 17-23 November
Christmastide	Fixed date feasts and ferias, December 24-Jan 5	Class II	Vigil and Octave Day Class I; Class II Octave; otherwise Class IV
Epiphanytide	Feast of the Epiphany (Jan 6) and Sundays after; Feast of the Purification (Feb 2); note that end date determined by Easter (Septuagesima Sunday).	Class II	Class IV

And with this we have pretty much covered the calendar!

I plan on one more post, just to bring all of this material together in the sample Ordo have been constructing as we've gone along for August 2018. 

So if you have any questions on any of the material covered in this series, or on things that haven't been answered in it, please do speak up now and I'll try and include the answers in the next (and last) post in this series.

Understanding the calendar VIA - The liturgical year Pt 1

St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 390: Antiphonarium officii (Antiphonary for liturgy of the hours) (https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/csg/0390).

The cycles in the Office

So far in this series on how the calendar for the Office works we've looked at:

• the hours, each of which have some fixed texts generally said every day at that particular hour;
• the day of the week, which dictates changes to either the psalms and a few other texts (antiphons, responsories), and in some cases the chants used (for example the hymn tune used for Compline changes on Saturdays and Sundays);
• the date - feasts which have fixed dates;
• the month. There are days and offices that are fixed to particular days of the week in particular calendar months (such as Matins readings for the Office of Our Lady on Saturday, the September Ember Days and Matins reading from August to November).

The last cycle we need to cover is that of the liturgical year cycle, which is largely dependent on the date of Easter, which varies each year depending on the date of the 'Paschal Full Moon'.

In this post, a little background, and then in the next I'll work through the cycle of  'movable feasts' and liturgical seasons and the key rules associated with them.

The Office and the liturgical year - the ferial character of the early Office

Today we take for granted that the Office and the Mass cycles are and should be closely linked.

As I noted earlier in this series, however, most if not all of these connections are the result of the later, gradual development of the Office rather than necessarily having been in place in St Benedict's time.

Although St Benedict specifies that a Gospel reading be included at Matins each Sunday for example, we don't know if this was always one of the accounts of the Resurrection (as was the case in the Office in Gaul described by St Benedict's contemporary Caesarius of Arles), or (more likely in my view) a continuous reading of the Gospels over the year (the remnants of which are suggested in one of the earliest Mass lectionaries, the Wutzburg Sacramentary), or, as is now the case, the reading used at the Mass.

The development of the connections

We do know however that the practice of using the third nocturn for Patristic readings related to the fixed Gospel cycle is a ninth century Frankish development, rather than reflecting Roman practice of the time.

Similarly, the addition of collects to the Benedictine Office (as for the Office used in the Lateran) seems to have been a relatively late development.

Even the special forms of the Office used during the Sacred Triduum, for example, have actually been imported from the Roman Office, and their use has been resisted strongly by Benedictines at times (since it means that all 150 psalms can't be said in a week, contrary to RB 18).

The liturgical year in the modern Office

The cycle we are now looking at, which depends each year on the calculation of the date of Easter, is often described as that of the movable feasts, key dates of which are solemnly announced each year on the feast of the Epiphany, a remnant of a period before the ready availability of Ordos.

In fact you can find a list of these key dates (Ash Wednesday, Easter etc) for many years to come in the front section of the Diurnal.

The texts that are linked to these dates can be found in the 'temporale' section of the Diurnal (or breviary) and includes:

• (in the breviary) the readings used at Matins from Septuagesima to July, and the cycle of Gospels and third Nocturn readings from August to November;
• the collect used at Matins, Lauds, and Terce to Vespers each day, except where it is displaced by a feast;
• the canticle antiphons used on Sundays that are not feasts;
• the texts needed for the observance of various 'movable' feasts; and 
• texts for the specials seasons and times of the year.

In the next post we will start working through the key parts of the liturgical year.

Understanding the calendar VB - The monthly cycle from August to January

In the last post in this series on how the calendar for the Office works I started looking at the monthly cycle in the Office.

In this post I want to continue this, focusing particularly on the practical application of  the Office history we looked at in the last post on compiling your personal Ordo.

The Sunday cycle of readings: August to November 

I noted in the last post that the earliest surviving Order of readings for the Roman Office started from Easter and Pentecost, and then shifted to a cycle tied to the calendar month for the rest of the year.

That system, however, was gradually pushed back and reorganised as the seasons of Advent and Epiphanytide solidified.

In the 1962 Office, the remnant of the earlier cycle relates mainly to the Matins readings for August to November, and the Saturday Magnificat antiphons that foreshadow them.

In essence, each Sunday during this period ushers in a new set of readings for Matins used in the first Nocturn of Sunday.  

The actual number of Sundays in a given month, though, varies from year to year.

For this reason, the breviary also includes a set of rules on which Sundays to skip if necessary, generally arranged to maximise the number of Scriptural books sampled.

You can find these rules (which differ for each month) in the Diurnal in the 'temporale' section.

For August, for example, it says:

If the first Sunday falls between August 1 and August 3, then the month has five Sundays.  If however the first Sunday falls between August 4 and 7, then the month has four Sundays only and the Antiphon assigned to the fifth Sunday is omitted. (MD 450*)

Ordo for August 2018

If we apply the rubrics for August Sundays  to 2018, we find that the first Sunday falls on August 5, so the month has only four Sundays in this year.

Accordingly, we can assign them in our Ordo as follows:

Sunday August 5: First Sunday of August (Matins first nocturn readings are from Proverbs 1: 1-22)
Sunday August 12: Second Sunday of August (Ecclesiastes 1:1-17)
Sunday August 19: Third Sunday of August (Wisdom 1:1-13)
Sunday August 26: Fourth Sunday of August (Ecclesiasticus/Sirach 1:1-16)

The readings and antiphon for the Fifth Sunday of August (from Ecclesiasticus 5:1-16) are not used this year.

In the Roman Office, this reading cycle is carried through to weekdays as well, but in the Benedictine Office, these only kick in from November.

Our Ordo for August is still incomplete though, as we still lack the readings for the Third Nocturn of Matins, the Gospels, collects and canticle antiphons for the Sundays, determined by the cycle of Sundays dependent on the date of Easter.

Advent

If we move to December though, the two Sundays cycles reunite by shifting totally to a calendar month basis. 

For most of the year, the Sunday cycle depends on the date of Easter, which varies each year: one the date of Easter is ascertained you count backwards a set number of days to calculate the start of Lent and the pre-Lenten season of Septuagesima; count forward to get the date of the Ascension and Pentecost, and then the number of the Sunday after the Octave of Pentecost.

By contrast, the cycle of Sundays of Advent is linked to the calendar month: Advent always starts on the Sunday closest to 30 November and ends on 23 December.

That means the number of days in Advent varies each year.

Just when and how the liturgy for the season of Advent developed remains the subject of vigorous academic debate.

However it happened, the net result is that Advent in the Benedictine Office is easily the most complicated part of the year in the Office, because it involves three different overlays that interact in different ways each year:

• a fixed date system for the 'Class II' days of December 17-23, with the O antiphons used at Vespers;
• psalm antiphons for the day of the week from 17-23 December, and otherwise for the week of Advent; and
• Matins readings and canticle antiphons for each of the four weeks of Advent.

I'll come back to some of the issues around the Ordo in Advent in the next part of this series, on the cycle of the liturgical year.

Epiphanytide

The end of Advent in December is determined by a fixed date feast, viz the Nativity and its Vigil.

Thereafter a series of fixed day feasts combine with the Octave of Christmas to take us into January.

And that month works the opposite way to December: the start of the cycle of the Sundays after Epiphany is determined, as the name suggests, by a relationship to a fixed date feast (ie the first Sunday after January 6), but its end is determined by the resumption of the Sunday cycle related to Easter, in the pre-Lenten season of Septuagesimatide.

There is a complicated history behind this.

The season after the feast of the Epiphany developed in the period up to the eighth century to add an Octave to the feast of the Epiphany, and ends forty days after Christmas with Candlemass on 2 February.

But at the same time that this cycle was firming up, the Lenten and pre-Lenten cycle was being gradually being pushed back, eventually settling on starting with Septuagesima Sunday, whose date potentially cuts across the symmetry of a forty day Christmas season.

The organic development of the liturgy is not always neat and tidy!

Feasts and days tied to calendar months - Ember Days

The final dimension of the calendar month cycle that needs to be taken into account in compiling our Ordo relates to feasts and special days in the calendar that are tied to months rather than fixed dates.

One simple example of this, with a relatively recent origin (instituted in 1925) is the feast of Christ the King, which in the 1962 calendar is tied to the last Sunday of October.

The much more ancient one is Ember Days.

Ember Days are sets of Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays days devoted to fasting and prayer that occur four times a year.

They have their own Matins readings, canticle antiphons at Lauds and Vespers, and collects, and are ranked as Class II days in the calendar.

Originally, Ember Days were tied to harvests; in the central middle ages the 'March' and 'June' Ember Days become connected to the flow of the liturgical year rather than the monthly cycle.

The September and December Ember Days, though, still reflect the older system.

In the 1962 Office, the September Ember Days are linked to the third week of September, and in the pre-1962 Rules, this meant they always occurred on the Wednesday after the feast of the Exaltation of Holy Cross.   A rather odd rule change means this is no longer always the case.

The December Ember Days are always placed in the third week of Advent, ensuring that they fall after the feast of St Lucy (December 13).

Next up...

Coming next, a look at the final Office cycle, that related to the date of Easter each year.

Understanding the calendar VA - Seasons and the monthly cycle in the Office Pt I

So far in this series I've looked at how the hours, day of the week and fixed dates affect the Office.

I now want to get to the issue that prompted this series, namely the monthly cycle.

This least appreciated cycle of the Office has a rich history, and so I'm planning to tackle this in two parts.

In this post, I want to provide a bit of an introduction to the monthly cycle by focusing on the 'ferial' character of the Office as St Benedict describes it in his Rule, and particularly look at the design of Matins.  While most people don't actually say Matins regularly, it is useful to understand since it has flow on effects to some of the day hours.

In the next part I will focus more on the days, feasts and seasons that are tied to calendar months and dates rather than Easter.

The monthly cycle and the history of the Office

We are used to thinking of the Mass and Office as being connected through the fixed Sunday cycle of the collects and readings.

But none of these connections are mentioned by St Benedict in the Rule, and in fact they almost certainly largely reflect rather later developments of the Office.

In particular, the Rule does not mention the use of collects in the Office at all (1).

Instead, the early Office had a much stronger relationship to the calendar year, and at least some of this flavour remains in the 1962 Office and calendar.

The length of the Night Office (Matins)

Consider first the design of Matins, where St Benedict specifies two broad 'seasons', with three readings and responsories each weekday from November to Easter (winter), but only a short verse and responsory for the rest of the year (RB 10).

The inspirations for this design seem to me to be twofold (2).

The early Egyptian Office: The first source is the early Egyptian monastic Office, popularised and advocated for in the West by St John Cassian.  This form of the Office seems to have had a fixed in format regardless of the time of year: it had twelve psalms at Vespers and twelve in the Night Office, in each case with a couple of (other) Scriptural readings.

Variable length Offices: Many other early Offices though, up until at least the eighth century, adjusted the length of the Night Office with the seasons, by a combination of shortening or lengthening the individual readings, adjusting the number of readings, and most importantly, increasing or decreasing the number of psalms said.

The monastic Office associated with St Augustine, for example, which may have represented the earliest Roman monastic practice, varied between 12, 15 or 18 psalms each night, as well as either two or three readings, according to the seasons (and hence the length of the night).

Similarly, a (non-monastic) Night hour in use in Rome and the surrounding region in the sixth century (described in the Liber Diurnis) had either 3 or 4 psalms, readings and responsories on weekdays, depending on the time of year, and nine of each on Sundays.

St Benedict's Office arguably represents something of a compromise between these two styles of Office.

Like the Egyptian monastic Office, St Benedict kept the number of psalms fixed regardless of the season, with twelve psalms said in the two Nocturns said each night, and another twelve to mark the number of hours of the day, from Prime to None.

Like the Roman and several other early offices, Sundays had a longer, more elaborate structure that remained the same regardless of season (although St Benedict does flag the possibility of shortening the readings if the monks sleep in: RB 11).

But St Benedict also offered a concession to the variable Office model by cutting the length of the weeknight readings drastically for the part of the year when the nights are shorter (in the Northern Hemisphere).

Summer and winter chant tones/hymns at Lauds and Vespers

Seasons are also marked in the Office in other ways, most notably the hymns of Lauds and Vespers.

On Sundays, the Office actually has different hymns for use at Sunday Matins and Lauds from October onwards.

And on the other days of the week, different chant tones are used for summer and winter at Lauds and Vespers.

While the particular hymns we use now are mostly not the ones St Benedict would have used himself (the Vespers hymns, for example, are traditionally attributed to St Gregory the Great, c540-604), the use of different hymns depending on the time of year goes back to at least St Benedict's time.

It is documented for Gaul in the Office described by one of St Benedict's early sixth century contemporaries, Caesarius of Arles, for example, and also reflected in a collection of hymns almost certainly taken to England with the mission dispatched by St Gregory the Great.

The Matins reading cycle

The other key element of Matins governed by the calendar year cycle is the readings.

In St Benedict's time the Sunday cycle of Gospel readings was much more fluid and developed than it was to become later, and the earliest surviving Matins lectionaries reflect this.

'Ordo XIV', which probably describes sixth and seventh century Roman practice, for example, prescribes a cycle where all if the canonical books of Scripture were read in the course of the year.

Although the cycle was reformed somewhat later on, probably in the eighth century, the cycle laid out in this document still underpins the Scriptural reading cycle (and the responsories) used at Matins in the 1962 Office in the First Nocturn on Sundays and ferial 'winter' weekdays outside of Lent and Advent.

The reading cycle starts with the first seven books of the Bible in the lead up to Easter, and then moves to Acts and the last books of the Bible (the Catholic Epistles and Revelation) during Eastertide.

After for period after Easter, the books to be read are listed by reference to the season (Kings and Chronicles were originally read up to Autumn for example, before being cut back at the end of July in the eighth century reform) or month.

Over time the cycle has been formalised into set readings for each night; shortened, so that only selections are used rather than the whole of Scripture read; and displaced altogether on weekdays in some seasons.

Nonetheless it is this cycle that dictates that from August onwards, the First Nocturn readings at Matins are linked to the week of the calendar month rather than the Sunday liturgical cycle.

And since the weeks Matins readings are foreshadowed each week in the canticle antiphon for Vespers, this means that the cycle of antiphons for I Vespers of Sunday doesn't match up to the cycle of collects from August to November each year.

The next part in this series looks at this cycle in more detail.

Notes

(1) The hours as described in the Rule end generally  end with the litany (ie  Kyrie Eleison...) and Our Father.   The eighth century Roman Office as described by Amalarius of Metz also lacked collects, though the surviving books suggest that collects were used in some places in Rome fairly early on.  Some early forms of the Office certainly used collects (though not necessarily the Sunday ones), but their use seems mainly to have been limited to clerics.  

(2) This is my take on the subject, but whether or not these developments were instigated by St Benedict himself, or were largely anticipated in the Roman Office before him remains a subject of debate.  There are two datapoints for the use of a variable, rather than fixed weekly cursus for Rome before St Benedict: the Rule of the Master (though its dating and location continues to be subject to debate); and the 'Cautio Episcopi', which we know reflects actual practice, as the protests of clerics at one of Rome's tituli at the imposition of a Night Vigil on them has survived.  It is possible of course, as at least one study has noted recently, that the Roman Office in at least one of the basilicas had already moved to a fixed weekly psalm cursus before St Benedict.  But most if not all of the evidence and methodology relied on by Callaewaert and other twentieth century liturgists to argue this case has arguably been undermined by more recent work. 

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.

Understanding the calendar IVB - Fixed date feasts and Sundays

In the last post in this series on the calendar, we looked at how the General Calendar of feasts fixed to particular dates of the year interacts with the Office for ordinary (Class IV) days of the week.

I want to devote one more post to the detail of how to resolve conflicts between days of the week and fixed date feasts, looking at the case of Class II Sundays.  

If you work through these two posts, you will understand the general principles of how it works, and hopefully will be able to use the tables in the Diurnal to resolve the other situations in which these conflicts arise for yourself!

Sundays

Sundays have always been celebrated with more solemnity than other days in the Office.  St Benedict, for example, gives Sunday Matins an extra 'Nocturn', includes the reading of the Gospel and two extra hymns in it.

He also stressed that the psalm cycle started afresh each Sunday.

Over the centuries, however, the proliferation of feasts and rules for them that equated many feasts with Sundays meant that the texts of the core Sunday cycle was often displaced by feasts.

This situation was changed by reforms of Pope Pius X in 1913 which gave Sundays a privileged position in relation to feasts of the same or even higher rank, and can mean that a particular feast isn't celebrated at all in a particular year, or that its celebration is muted in various ways.

It can also mean that even though the Sunday is displaced by a feast, it is still remembered in the Office as a 'commemoration'.

Resolving conflicts - the two tables

You might expect that the rules on which feast or day are celebrated would be pretty straightforward: Class I feasts would trump Class II feasts or days, Class II feasts could trump Class II feasts and so on.

Unfortunately, while broadly true, it is not quite that straightforward, as we have already seen from the case of Saturday night Vespers, where when the Sunday is displaced by a feast, it is still 'commemorated' in the closing prayers of the hour.

There are a range of options as to what can happen when a feast falls on a Sunday, ranging from the feast being transferred to another day, the Sunday or the feast being commemorated, or the feast completely overriding the normal Sunday Office.

In the last post, we started looking at the 'two tables' contained in the front section of the Diurnal, which cover cases of 'occurrence and 'concurrence'.

Concurrence, it was noted, is about resolving which set of texts to use at Vespers when there are two competing possibilities, such as when Vespers of a feast potentially clashes with Saturday Vespers (I Vespers of Sunday).

The concurrence table also tells us what to do when a Class I feast (ie a feast that has first Vespers) occurs on a Monday (it tells us that a commemoration of the Monday feast is said at Sunday Vespers).

In this post, though, I want to focus primarily on the question of 'occurrence', when feasts of the General Calendar coincide with a Class II Sunday.

Sundays override memorials and Class III feasts and vigils.

Let's start with the simplest case, the two lowest rankings of days set out in the General Calendar: memorials (not covered in the table), Class III feasts, and Class III vigils.

These rank below Sundays, and so are not  celebrated when they coincide with a Sunday in a particular year.

In the August 2018 Ordo that we have been constructing then, we need to note that two of the memorial listed for August in the General Calendar are not celebrated this year - August 5's Our Lady of the Snows, and St Clare on August 12. 

Class II feasts and vigils

When it comes to Class II days, Sundays ranked Class II generally have priority over Class II feasts and vigils.

Sundays completely override Class II Vigils.

Accordingly if the Vigil of St Lawrence (August 8) falls on a Sunday in a particular year, it is not marked in the Office at all.

Class II feasts, though, even when they do not form the main Office of the day are still remembered in the Office through a 'commemoration' at Lauds.  In 2018, for example, the feast of St Martin in November coincides with a Sunday, and so is reduced to a commemoration.

The key exception to the priority of Sundays over Class II feasts is for 'feasts of Our Lord'.  When these fall on a Sunday, they completely replace the Sunday, with no commemorations of it.

In 2017, for example, the Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord coincided with a Sunday, so even though the feast is ranked Class II, it had a first Vespers, and the Office of the feast was used without any commemorations of the Sunday.

Class I feasts and Class II Sundays

Class I feasts do have priority over Class II Sundays.

When this happens though, except in the case of Feasts of Our Lord, the importance of the Sunday cycle is emphasized by its remembrance through commemorations at both Lauds and Vespers.

In summary

The table below summarises the rules discussed above.

If a Class II Sunday coincides with a…	Office is of…	Vespers impact
Memorial	Memorial is not marked in the Office	Not affected.
Class III Feast or Vigil	Feast or vigil is not marked in the Office	Not affected
Class II Vigil	Vigil is not marked in the Office	Of the Sunday
Class II Feasts other than those of Our Lord	Of the Sunday with commemorations of the feast at Lauds	Of the Sunday
Class II  Feasts of Our Lord	Feast, with I Vespers and no commemoration  of Sunday	I&II Vespers of the feast
Class I	Of the feast with commemorations of the Sunday at Lauds and Vespers (unless feast of Our Lord)	I&II Vespers of the feast

Adding in local feasts

In the last two posts we've looked at fixed date feasts of the General Calendar of 1962.

In the next post I will to look at other sources of fixed date feasts.

Understanding the calendar Part IVA - The fixed date feasts of the general calendar

So far in this series on how the calendar works in the 1962 Benedictine Office in the 1962 Office I've looked at:

• the daily cycle of 'hours' and the rationale for them;
• the days of the week; and the ranking of days and feasts.

This week I want to look at how to take account of the feasts that occur on fixed dates through the year.

In this post I will look at feasts that occur on weekdays; in the next we will look at the rules for Sundays; and the third I will look at adding in local feasts, as well as alternative calendars.

Some of what follows will be very familiar to some, but new to others.  

Either way, it is important to make sure you thoroughly understand it, as even if you normally follow an Ordo, there are some local feasts that you will need to add in to your Office, and that requires you to apply these principles to them.

The base 'Ordo'

In the last post I noted that feasts and days can be ranked from Class I to Class IV, with the 'default' ranking of days such that Monday to Saturdays are Class IV; and Sundays (which start from I Vespers of Saturday) are Class II.

The base texts for these days are contained in the 'psalter' section of your Office book, supplemented by the texts for Saturdays Office of Our Lady (in the section with 'Commons of feasts').

So your starting point 'Ordo' looks something like:

Sunday - Class II

All as in the psalter for a Sunday

Monday - Class IV

All as in the psalter for Monday

Tuesday - Class IV

All as in the psalter

Wednesday - Class IV

All as in the psalter 

Thursday – Class IV

All as in the psalter

Friday - Class IV

All as in the psalter

[I Vespers of Our Lady on Saturday]

Saturday - Class IV; Office of Our Lady on Saturday

Matins to None:  All as for the Office of Our Lady on Saturday
Vespers: Of Saturday (=I Vespers of Sunday)
Compline: As in the psalter

The general calendar of 1962 for Benedictines 

The next step is to overlay this with the feasts fixed to particular calendar dates.

The calendar contains two main types of feasts: the cycle based around the life of Our Lord, as well as the various Marian feasts; and those of the saints.

The feasts of saints are generally linked to the date of their heavenly birth, that is their death on earth, though in some cases for various reasons their feasts are moved to other dates.

Most Office books contain a table listing out all of the feasts attached to particular dates, arranged by month.

The version in the Diurnal, which you can find starting on page xi, is the officially approved 1962 calendar for the Benedictine Confederation (I'll come back to the question of alternate calendars and when they are permitted in due course).  

The listing for the first half of August can be translated as looking like this:

1 August - Class IV; The Holy Maccabees, memorial
2 August – Class IV; St Alphonsus Mary de Liguori, memorial
3 August - Class IV
4 August - St. Dominic, Class III
5 August – Class IV; Dedication of the Church of Our Lady of the Snows, memorial
6 August - Transfiguration of Our Lord, Class II
7 August - Class IV; SS Sixtus II, Felicissimus and Agapitus, memorial
8 August - Class IV; St Cyriacus, memorial 
9 August – Vigil of St Lawrence, Class III
10 August - St Lawrence, Class II
11 August - Class IV; St. Tiburtius, Memorial
12 August – Class IV; St. Clare, memorial 
13 August - Class IV; SS Pontianus and Hippolytus, memorial 
14 August – Vigil of the Assumption, Class II           
15 August - Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Class I

Not all of these feasts are necessarily observed every year, as the extent to which the monthly calendar interacts with the weekly cycle is governed by a series of rules ('rubrics').

Let's take a look at some of the key ones for Class IV (week) days.

Memorials on Class IV days

A good starting place is memorials, the lowest level of feasts of saints.

The key rule is that Memorials do not displace Class IV days, but are celebrated in conjunction with them by making a 'commemoration'* of the feast of the saint at Lauds (only).

If we were putting together an Ordo for August 2018, then just looking at the memorials for the moment, we find that the first day of August in 2018 was a Wednesday.

In the last post I gave as template for a Class IV Wednesday.  To that we just need to add an instruction to observe the memorial:

Wednesday 1 August - Class IV; The Holy Maccabees, memorial 

Matins: All as for Wednesday in the psalter
Lauds: All as for Wednesday in the psalter, with a commemoration of the Holy Maccabees.
Prime: All as for Wednesday in the psalter
Terce to None:  All as for Tuesday to Saturday in the psalter
Vespers: All as for Wednesday in the psalter
Compline: All as in the psalter

or we could simply say:

All as for Wednesday in the psalter, with a commemoration of the Maccabees at Lauds.

Exactly the same principle applies to the memorials listed for August 2, 7, 8, 11, and 13 August, which fall on weekdays this year.

The actual texts you need to make these commemorations (ie add the antiphon, versicle and collect after the collect of the day in the closing prayers) are contained in the 'Proper of the Saints' section of the book (in the Diurnal, the pages with page numbers in square brackets).

For the memorial of the Holy Maccabees, you can find them on pages [209-10] of the Diurnal, page 988 of the Antiphonale Monasticum, or pages [76-7] of the 1962 Monastic Breviary.

 

Feasts and weekdays

The second category to consider is the Class I, II and III feasts of the calendar that fall on weekdays in any particular year.

Again the key principles are very simple: 

1.  Higher level feasts (Class I, II or III) displace lower level weekdays (Class IV).

2.  Class I feasts normally start from I Vespers, ie the day before the feast (note: there are special rules for when two feasts occur in a row, and for Saturday Vespers, and I'll come back to these).

3.  All other levels of feasts affect the Office from Matins to Compline only.*  

*Note: In pre-1962 Calendars, the equivalent to Class II feasts started with I Vespers, and some monasteries retain this practice. 

Let's start by overlaying the General Calendar for August with the days of the week in 2018, leaving aside Saturdays and Sundays for the moment.

On Monday August 6, the feast of the Transfiguration, as Class II, displaces the default Class IV day.  

And the same thing occurs on Friday August 10 with the feast of St Lawrence.

Because the Feast of the Assumption is Class I, though, it also affects Tuesday 13 August, displacing its Vespers.

The actual way and extent to which a weekday's texts are displaced, depends on:

• the hour concerned.  At Prime, for example, only the antiphon can change; at Matins, Lauds and Vespers, 'festal' psalms sometimes displace those for the day of the week;
• the level of feast; and
• whether or not the feast has its own ('proper') antiphons, or just uses those for the type of saint concerned (ie Commons of Apostles, Martyrs, etc).

You can find notes on the way feasts impact on the normal texts of the day in the notes on each hour linked to in the Learn the Office page on this blog.

The simplest approach, though, is to follow the Ordo notes provided on this blog, which basically tells you which things change because of the feast, and where to find the relevant texts.

Vigils and weekdays

The August calendar also provides an example of another type of 'day' in the calendar to take account of, namely Vigils, in this case relating to the feasts of St Lawrence and the Assumption respectively.

Vigils, like feasts, can be Class I (such as for Christmas), II (as for the Assumption) or III (St Lawrence) and simply displace or add texts to the celebration of the normal weekday Office.

On Class II&III vigils, the main effect is on Matins, where the readings are those of the Vigil; at the day hours, the only change is the collect (at the hours other than Prime and Compline), which is of the vigil.

Feasts and Saturday Vespers

Finally, to complete our consideration of feasts and weekdays, we need to look at feasts that fall on Saturdays.

For Matins to None, the rules for Saturday are exactly the same as for other Class IV weekdays.

Saturday Vespers, however, are normally celebrated as 'I Vespers of Sunday', and the rules for Sundays are slightly different to those for weekdays, as they have a higher priority than most feasts.

Let's look at the example of the feast of St Dominic in August 2018.

Normally on a Class III feast, Vespers would be of the feast.

But in this case, that would conflict with First Vespers of the Sunday, which is effectively considered to be Class II.

The key to working out potential conflicts between Sundays and feasts is the 'Two tables' in Diurnal (pages xxv - xxvii).

The second table, concurrence, deals with situations like the feast of St Dominic, and it can be read as providing these rules:

1.  If (II) Vespers of a Class III feast coincides with I Vespers of a Class II Sunday (ie Saturday Vespers), Vespers of the feast is not celebrated.

2.  If (II Vespers) of a Class I or II feast coincides with I Vespers of a Class II Sunday, Vespers of the feast is celebrated with a 'commemoration' of the Sunday.


So for Saturday August 5 our Ordo would read:

Saturday 4 August - St Dominic, Class III

Matins to None: Of the feast of St Dominic
Vespers and Compline: Of the Sunday

If the feast of St Dominic had been Class II or I, however, Vespers would have been of the feast with a commemoration of the Sunday (made exactly the same way a commemoration of a memorial is done).

Summary and Ordo for August 2018

The table below summarises the principles we've looked at so far for feasts and weekdays.

If a Class IV day coincides with a feast ranked…	Office is of…	Vespers impact
Memorial	The Class IV day (or Office of Our Lady on Saturday) with a commemoration at Lauds	Not affected.
Class III	The Class III feast	Vespers of the day is of the feast unless the feast falls on a Saturday, in which case Vespers is of the Sunday.
Class II	The Class II feast	*No first Vespers; if falls on a Saturday, Second Vespers includes a commemoration of the Sunday.
Class I	The Class I feast	Class I feasts normally have both first and second Vespers; if it falls on a Saturday, Second Vespers includes a commemoration of the Sunday.

*Note that some monasteries retain I Vespers for Class II feasts.

A good way to check your understanding is to put together some short Ordo notes for the days of August listed above (leaving aside the Sundays for now).

Once you've had a go, check it against the listing below.

Wednesday 1 August - Class IV; The Holy Maccabees, memorial

All as in the psalter for Wednesday with a commemoration of the Holy Maccabees at Lauds

Thursday 2 August – Class IV; St Alphonsus Mary de Liguori, memorial

All as in the psalter with a commemoration of St Alphonsus at Lauds

Friday 3 August - Class IV

All as in the psalter

Saturday 4 August - St. Dominic, Class III

Matins to None: As for the feast of St Dominic

Vespers: I Vespers of the Sunday

Monday 6 August - Transfiguration of Our Lord, Class II

Matins to Compline: Of the feast

Tuesday 7 August - Class IV; SS Sixtus II, Felicissimus and Agapitus, memorial

All as in the psalter, with a commemoration at Lauds

Wednesday 8 August - Class IV; St Cyriacus, memorial

All as in the psalter, with a commemoration at Lauds

Thursday 9 August – Vigil of St Lawrence, Class III

Matins: Readings and collect of the Vigil

Prime: As for Thursday in the psalter

Lauds, Prime to Vespers: As in the psalter, with collect of the Vigil

Friday 10 August - St Lawrence, Class II

Matins to Compline: Of the feast

Saturday 11 August - Class IV, Office of Our Lady on Saturday; St. Tiburtius, Memorial

Matins to None: Office of Our Lady on Saturday with a commemoration at Lauds

Vespers: I Vespers of Sunday

Monday 13 August - Class IV; SS Pontianus and Hippolytus, memorial

All as in the psalter with a commemoration at Lauds

Tuesday 14 August – Vigil of the Assumption, Class II          

Matins: As for Tuesday in the psalter with readings and collect of the vigil

Lauds: As for Tuesday in the psalter with collect of the vigil

Prime: As for Tuesday in the psalter

Terce to None: As for Tuesday in the psalter with collect of the vigil

Vespers: I Vespers of the Assumption

Wednesday 15 August - Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Class I

Matins to Vespers: All of the feast.

The next post looks at how Sundays interact with the General Calendar.