The sacred Forty Days open at Rome’s Cathedral, the Papal Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior and of Saints John the Baptist and the Evangelist in the Lateran, the “Mother and Head of all the churches of the City and of the world.” The Roman Station anchors our Lent in a concrete place, as it…
What unifies the Mass of Sexagesima is neither its obvious placement between Septuagesima and Quinquagesima, nor the recurrence of penitential purple and the suppression of the Alleluia, but rather a demanding question posed by Holy Mother Church to her children as she stands at the threshold of Lent. Are you prepared to be drawn into…
We stand now nine Sundays out from Easter, poised at a hinge in the liturgical year where memory, expectation, and discipline converge. Context is decisive. The Church does not move through time as a mere sequence of dates but as a pedagogy of salvation, a slow schooling of the soul by repetition, anticipation, and restraint.…
This year we enjoy a rather brief span of Epiphanytide, that verdant stretch of the liturgical year in which Holy Church lingers over the manifestations of the Lord’s divinity before the purple veil of Septuagesima descends. The calendar itself catechizes. Some years Epiphanytide is fleeting, almost abrupt, curtailed by an early Easter. In some years…
We have made a firm move into Epiphanytide, that brief but densely charged stretch of the liturgical year which carries us from the great Feast itself toward the threshold of Septuagesima. Even as the calendar advances, there remains a strong magnetic pull back toward Epiphany, as though the Church, having once beheld the manifestation of…
We are in Epiphanytide, that stretch of the liturgical year whose very name, drawn from the Greek ἐπιφάνεια, signals manifestation, disclosure, the making-visible of divine reality within human history. From the beginning, Epiphany held a privileged place in the ancient Eastern Churches, where the Feast gathered into a single luminous focus several moments in which…
The Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus developed gradually from devotional practice into the Church’s universal liturgical calendar. Its scriptural foundation lies in the New Testament emphasis on the saving and sovereign power of the Name (Phil 2:9–11; Acts 4:12), but its formal celebration arose later through medieval pastoral reform. In the 15th century,…
Almighty and eternal God, who in the fullness of time sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, has placed us within the joyful mystery of the Octave of Christmas. In these sacred days time is suspended, as if Mother Church reached out and gently stopped the pendulum. A single day…
With apologies to the faithful Flannery O’Connor and with no apologies whatsoever to the weirdo Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Advent could be summarized as “everything that rises must converge.” Within the rhythm of the Advent season, the 4th Sunday stands as a moment of concentration and convergence. From the beginning, the season forms the…
The Church, as she leads us through Advent, does so with a pedagogy at once sober and exultant, marked by a rhythm that quickens as the great mysteries draw near. From the 1st Sunday, when the Lord is announced as still distant yet surely coming, the liturgy – Mass and Office – presses forward with…
The Church places before us on the 2nd Sunday of Advent a Gospel passage from Matthew 11:2-10 whose two movements mirror each other like the ends of a well bound book. The first concerns the identity of Christ as sought by the imprisoned Forerunner. The second concerns the identity of the Forerunner as confirmed by…
