Catholic Life

With the “Gesima”, pre-Lent Sundays we added a layer of context to our contexts: Roman Station churches.  Each day of Lent has, by millennial tradition, an assigned church in Rome.  On weekdays, people gathered at a nearby “collect” church and then processed singing penitential litanies and hymns to the “stopping” church, or “statio” where the…

The Feast we celebrate this Sunday is called the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.    On this day we definitively close out the Advent/Christmas cycle.  It is forty days since Christmas.  According to Mosaic Law, women who had given birth were required to offer a sacrifice for ritual purification.  Of course, Our Lady was not…

Because of the vagaries of your planet’s Moon, toward the end of this liturgical year and before the beginning of the next Advent, we will not have Remaining Sundays after Epiphany to fill in the calendrical gaps.  This year, we sail straight through the Sundays after Pentecost all the way to the 24th and Last…

Holy Church, knowing that we need more than one day to reflect manifestations of Christ’s divine nature, teased three miraculous events out into a chain of related holy days.  This was not wholly obliterated in the post-Conciliar calendar, but it is greatly obscured by the juggling of Epiphany onto this or that Sunday, the ending…