Liturgical Calendar

The Jubilee Year: Every 25 years, we celebrate a Jubilee Year within the Catholic Church. The tradition dates back to 1300 when Pope Boniface VIII instituted the first Jubilee Year. At that time, Jubilee Years were celebrated every 100 years. Eventually, the interval was shortened to every 25 years. This tradition allows Catholics worldwide to renew and strengthen their faith and relationship with Christ. The theme of this year's Jubilee is "Pilgrims of Hope," and it began with the opening of the Holy Foor of St. Peter's Basilica on December 24, 2024, by Pope Francis.

The Jubilee Prayer
Father in Heaven, may the faith you have gifted us in your son Jesus Christ, our brother, and the flame of charity kindled in our hearts by the Holy Spirit reawaken in us the blessed hope for the coming of your Kingdom. May your graces transform us into diligent cultivators of the evangelical seeds that make humanity, and the cosmos rise unto the confident expectation of the new heavens and the new earth, when the powers of Evil are overcome and your glory shall be manifested eternally. May the grace of the Jubilee reawaken in us, Pilgrims of Hope, and the yearning for heavenly treasures and pour over all the earth the joy and peace of our Redeemer. To you God blessed in eternity, be praise and glory, for ever and ever. Amen

Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord: When this Solemnity falls on a weekday, it is a Holy Day of Obligation requiring attendance at Mass according to the Church’s precepts. The bishops of the USA and Canada, however, have moved its observance to the next Sunday. It is the oldest yearly festival of the Church, in addition to the celebration of the Lord’s Resurrection. This feast remembers the day Jesus’s disciples witnessed His Ascension into Heaven from the Mount of Olives (Acts 1:9). For forty days after His Resurrection (as the ancients counted with Resurrection Sunday counting as day #1), Jesus taught His Church and gave instructions to the Apostles and disciples before He ascended to the Father (Acts 1:1-3). At dinner with His disciples, the post-Resurrection Jesus instructed them not to leave Jerusalem but to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:4-5). Then, standing on the Mount of Olives, on the fortieth day after His Resurrection, Jesus gave His disciples the mission of His New Covenant Church. He told them, “… you will receive the power of the Holy Spirit which will come on you, and then you will be my witnesses not only in Jerusalem but throughout Judaea and Samaria, and indeed to the earth’s remotest end” (Acts 1:8). After the Lord ascended into Heaven in a cloud, the disciples returned to the Upper Room in Jerusalem and continued in prayer. The 120 faithful disciples of the New Covenant people of God prayed for nine days with the Virgin Mary in preparation for the promised coming of God the Holy Spirit, who will fill and indwell the Church and give them the continuing Divine Presence of Christ (Acts 1:12-15). 

St. Paul wrote to the members of the Church at Ephesus that Christ is the Head of the Church; He is the fullness of the One who fills all in all (Eph 1:23). We celebrate the spiritual fullness of Christ on the Solemnity of the Ascension. At the end of his Gospel, St. Matthew records that Jesus told His disciples, “I am with you always” (Mt 28:20). The Feast of the Ascension is not about Christ’s absence but His continual Presence among His people. The local bishop or bishops’ council can transfer this Solemnity to the nearest Sunday instead of traditionally celebrating it on a Thursday, the fortieth day after the Resurrection. Check your local diocese’s website.

Solemnity of Pentecost: It was on the Old Covenant Feast of Weeks (Shavuot), known in Greek as “Pentecost” (fiftieth day), fifty days after Jesus’ Resurrection from the dead, that the Holy Spirit took possession of the New Covenant Church (Acts 2). The Old Covenant feast (see Lev 23:15-22) was celebrated fifty days after the Feast of Firstfruits. God ordained that Firstfruits would fall on the day after the Old Covenant Sabbath (Saturday) during the holy week of the Feast of Unleavened Bread on the first day of the week we call Sunday (Lev 23:9-11). In AD 30, the Jewish feast of Firstfruits was the same day Jesus rose from His tomb as the “first fruits” of the dead, on the first day of the week, Resurrection Sunday. Counting fifty days from the Sunday of Firstfruits, as the ancients counted with no zero-place-value, was the Feast of Weeks/Pentecost, also on the first day of the week, our Sunday (Lev 23:15-16). These are the only two of the seven God-ordained annual festivals that did not have a prescribed date. Their day of celebration changed each year for all the other feasts (see Lev 23:5, 6, 24, 27, 34). However, Firstfruits and Weeks/Pentecost always fell on the first day of the week, on a Sunday. The two feasts prefigure two significant events in Salvation History: the Resurrection of Jesus Christ on the first day of the week (Sunday) of the holy week of the Feast of Unleavened Bread in 30 AD (Mt 28:1; Mk 16:1-2; Lk 24:1-3; Jn 20:1-2), and fifty days later the coming of the Holy Spirit on a Sunday to take possession of the New Covenant Church (Acts 2:1-3). In the first century AD, Jewish priest/historian Flavius Josephus (39-100 AD) recorded that at some point, Jewish religious leaders altered the day for the celebrations so that they no longer fell annually on the first day of the week (Sunday). This alteration separated the link between these Old Covenant feasts and their fulfillment in the New Covenant (Antiquities of the Jews, 13.8.4 [252]). See the document on Pentecost.

The Return to Ordinary Time Part II in the Liturgical Calendar: We returned to Ordinary Time the day after the Solemnity of Pentecost. Like the ancients, who counted days, weeks, months, and years without the concept of a zero place value, the Church counts the days between Jesus’s Resurrection and the Feast of Pentecost, starting the 50-day count with Easter Sunday as day #1. This year, the Feast of the Ascension fell forty days after Resurrection Sunday on May 9^th, and Pentecost fifty days from Easter on May 19, after which we return to Ordinary Time in the Church’s calendar. There are five Church seasons: Advent, Christmas, Lent, the Paschal Triduum (a three-day season), and Easter. The Sundays of the major seasons of the Liturgical Year are distinguished by their relationship to the Solemnities of Christmas (Advent and Christmas) and Easter (Lent and Easter). Two blocks of Ordinary Time come between the seasons. Ordinary time is not a season; it is just a way to describe the weeks between seasons and refer to all the days outside the major seasons and Sundays that fall under the heading of celebrations of the “Day of the Lord.” The word “ordinary” means “regular” or “plain,” but it also means “counted.” Ordinal numbers are 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, and so on; this is the definition of “Ordinary Time” since we count the weeks between the Church’s seasons in ordinal numbers.

The weeks of Ordinary Time number thirty-three or thirty-four, depending on the year, and refer to two parts of the liturgical year. The first part begins on the Sunday after Epiphany (although the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord always takes precedence over the first Sunday) and continues until Ash Wednesday. With the date of Easter varying every year, the first part of Ordinary Time may include as few as four weeks and as many as nine weeks. Part II of Ordinary Time begins the day after Pentecost and continues to the Saturday before the 1^st Sunday of Advent.

Each year during Ordinary Time, we read through one of the Gospels. One year, we read cycle A, which concentrates on readings from the Gospel of St Matthew. The following year, we turn to Cycle B, the focus of which is St. Mark’s Gospel, and in the third year, Cycle C, we turn to readings from St. Luke’s Gospel until we repeat the cycle. God reveals His divine plan for humanity in the two Testaments, which is why we read and relive the events of salvation history in the Old and New Testaments in the Church’s Liturgy. In her wisdom, the Church teaches that the Liturgy reveals the unfolding mystery of God’s plan as we read the Old Testament in light of the New and the New Testament in light of the Old (CCC 1094-1095).

Chart of the Liturgical Calendar:

Memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church
At the conclusion of the Third Session of the Second Vatican Council in 1964, St. Paul VI declared the Blessed Virgin Mary the “Mother of the Church” to all Christian people, including the faithful and the pastors, who call her the most loving Mother and established that “the Mother of God should be further honored and invoked by the entire Christian people by this tenderest of titles.”

On February 11, 2018, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments inscribed a new obligatory Memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Mother of the Church into the General Roman Calendar. This memorial is celebrated every year on the Monday after Pentecost. This date is appropriate since Mary was also present in the Upper Room for the birth of the Church when God the Holy Spirit came to fill and indwell the assembly, praying with her. This devotion is intended to “encourage the growth of the maternal sense of the Church in the pastors, religious and faithful, as well as a growth of genuine Marian piety.”

The decree reflects on the history of Marian theology in the Church’s liturgical tradition and the writings of the Church Fathers. The decree states that Saint Augustine and Pope Saint Leo the Great reflected on the Virgin Mary’s importance in the mystery of Christ: “In fact, the former (St. Augustine) says that Mary is the mother of the members of Christ because, with charity, she cooperated in the rebirth of the faithful into the Church, while the latter (St. Leo the Great) says that the birth of the Head is also the birth of the body, thus indicating that Mary is at once Mother of Christ, the Son of God, and mother of the members of his Mystical Body, which is the Church.”
The decree states that these reflections result from the “divine motherhood of Mary and her intimate union in the work of the Redeemer.” It declares that Sacred Scripture depicts Mary at the foot of the Cross of her beloved Son of God (cf. Jn 19:25). There she became the Mother of the Church when she “accepted her Son’s testament of love and welcomed all people in the person of the beloved disciple as sons and daughters to be reborn unto life eternal.”

Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus (Corpus Christi): The universal Roman calendar celebrates this Solemnity on the Thursday after the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity. However, the United States and Canada observe it on the Sunday after the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity. The origin of this feast goes back to the Middle Ages when Christians wanted to joyfully celebrate Jesus’s precious gift of the Eucharist in a solemnity that echoed Holy Thursday. They created this feast in the spring to hold joyful processions, street fairs, and other outdoor events for their faith communities. The faithful carried the transformed bread of the Lord’s Body outdoors under a canopy in processions with music playing, and the people joined in singing their favorite hymns of praise. Parishes in Latin America and Europe celebrate this Solemnity with joyful and colorful processions.

Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist: The celebration of most saints’ days remembers that saint on the anniversary of their entrance into Heaven, but there are three festivals celebrating a saint’s natural birth. The Church celebrates the births/nativities of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and St. John the Baptist. They were filled with the Holy Spirit in their mothers’ wombs before their births. The angel Gabriel told St. John the Baptist’s father that God filled his son with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb. The angel promised that his birth would be cause for rejoicing: “And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He will drink neither wine nor strong drink. He will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb, and he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God” (Lk 1:14-16). Observing this Solemnity, we obey the angel’s command to rejoice in St. John’s birth. St. John was the last of the Old Covenant prophets. God chose him before his birth to be the divinely appointed herald to announce the coming of the Redeemer-Messiah to the Jews (Mt 3:1-11). St. John fulfilled his divinely appointed mission when he baptized Jesus on the banks of the Jordan River in preparation for Jesus’s mission and announced Him as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (Mt 3:12-17; Mk 1:1-11; Lk 3:1-22; Jn 1:19-34). The Church established this feast very early in the Church’s history, at about the same time as the feast of the Christ Mass (Christmas).

Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus: In the Middle Ages, Roman Catholics began observing this Solemnity on the third Friday after Pentecost to remember and venerate the precious wounds of Christ. It echoed Good Friday as a day of devotion to the Passion of Christ in which the faithful remembered Jesus’s suffering to help them face their hardships. St. Gertrude the Great, who lived in the 13^th century, envisioned Jesus appearing to her as He did to St. Thomas the Apostle (Jn 20:24-29). Jesus showed St. Gertrude His wounds and taught her His love, which she said was pouring forth from His Sacred Heart. In the 17^th century, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque testified that Christ appeared to her in a vision and chose her to spread the devotion to the Sacred Heart. St. John Eudes preached about the loving heart of Jesus and composed a liturgy for the Feast of the Sacred Heart. 1765 Pope Clement XIII approved this devotion and set the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the Church’s calendar. See St. Bonaventure’s document on this Solemnity.

The Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary: The Church usually celebrates the Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the Saturday after the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus unless another feast takes precedence. Solemnities of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary celebrate God’s generous love. In the First Letter of St. John, he writes that “God is Love” (1 Jn 4:8). God is the author of life, and His deep and abiding love gives value and purpose to every human life. St. Louis Grignion de Montfort spread the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in France in the 18^th century to encourage Catholics to turn to the love of the Mother of Christ and all Christians (Rev 12:17b). The celebration is also a call to accept her comfort and her son’s promise that salvation is a gift of God open to all humanity.

Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul: Jesus renamed Simon, the Galilean Fisherman, to indicate the change in his destiny. Jesus gave him the title “Kepha,” meaning “rock” in Aramaic, and transliterated in English Bibles as “Peter” from the Greek Petros (Jn 1:42; Mt 16:17-18). Jesus commissioned Peter to become the “rock” on which He built His Kingdom of the Church (Mt 16:19; Jn 21:15-19) and the leader of the Apostles. After Jesus’s Resurrection, Peter took up his office as the Vicar of Christ and the steward of the new Davidic Kingdom of the Church. After several years in Jerusalem and seven years in Antioch, Syria, St. Peter traveled to Rome, where he established the center of the universal (Catholic) Church, which was, by Jesus’s command, to extend to the “ends of the earth” (Mt 28:19; Acts 1:8). According to early Church historians, St. Peter served for twenty-five years as the first Bishop of Rome and the Pope (Papa) of the universal Church. He suffered martyrdom by crucifixion during the reign of Emperor Nero circa AD 67, dying on the same day that St. Paul suffered martyrdom.

St. Paul was born with the Hebrew name “Saul” in the Roman provincial capital of Tarsus in Asia Minor. He was an officer of the Jewish Sanhedrin (Jewish high court) and persecuted Christians (Acts 8:1-3; 9:1-2; 22:3-5). While on the way to Damascus (Syria) to arrest Christians, Paul came face to face with a vision of the Resurrected Jesus Christ. His conversion experience led to his baptism and a life of service to Christ and His Church as the “apostle to the Gentiles” (Acts 9:3-19). Sponsored by his Christian community in Antioch, Syria, Paul led three missionary journeys into Asia Minor and Greece, where he successfully preached the Gospel and founded many faith communities. Later, the Roman governor of Judea sent Paul as a prisoner to Rome, where he lived under house arrest. Since he was allowed to have visitors, Paul taught the Christian communities of Rome for about two years until he was exonerated and freed after his trial. According to early Church historians, Paul made a fourth missionary journey to spread the Gospel in Spain and perhaps Britain after his release. Upon returning to Rome, the Romans arrested St. Paul again, and he suffered martyrdom on the same day as St. Peter. St. Peter suffered martyrdom by crucifixion, and St. Paul, a Roman citizen, suffered martyrdom by beheading in c. AD 67. The Memorial of the Martyrs of Rome under Nero on June 30^th recalls the saints whose names we do not know and who also died during the same persecution under which Sts. Peter and Paul suffered martyrdom.

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