Liturgical calendar

“ It is to be regretted that the reverend fathers who formed the council of Nicaea did not abandon the moon altogether, and appoint the first or second Sunday of April for the celebration of the Easter festival. The ecclesiastical calendar would in that case have possessed all the simplicity and uniformity of the civil calendar, which only requires the adjustment of the civil to the solar year ”

“ The days marked in the calendars are those of the saints’ deaths (vid. ante, p. 213) ; but the days on which their relics were translated to some particular church are also marked as festivals in the calendar of the church in question. When in different calendars different days are given to the same saint, the date in the calendar belonging to the church where he died [347] is usually to be regarded as the day of his death; the others are days on which his relics were translated. ”

“ It begins with Christmas, March is called mensis primus, the station churches of Rome are given in Lent, on the 13th May there is the Dedicatio Mariæ ad Martyres, All Saints does not appear. The only litany is the so-called litania major; the Annunciation and the Cathedra Petri are omitted, in March a pascha annotina is inserted without date, St Athanasius is passed over on the 20th January; there are only faint traces of Advent. This calendar is very ancient and formed part of the codex of the gospels written under Louis the Pious ”

“ The ecclesiastical year is divided into eight seasons, namely: Advent-tide, Christmas-tide, Epiphany-tide, Lenten-tide, Easter-tide, Ascension-tide, Whitsun-tide, and Trinity-tide. The first day of each of these seasons has been, and is now observed by the church in commemoration of some of the most remarkable events connected with the plan of redemption. All these will be noticed in the order in which they occur in the ecclesiastical year, while many other days intervening, which are observed as feasts or fasts, will be given a passing notice. ”

“ The Fasti of Ovid give an idea of the manner in which the Roman Calendar brought the ceremonial of religion to bear upon the course of life. For some centuries an acquaintance with the Calendar was the exclusive property of the sacred order [525] ”

“ According to the rule which obtained in later times and continued in use until the Gregorian reformation of the Calendar, the 14th day of the Ecclesiastical Moon took place on Saturday the 22nd, which would make Easter-day happen on the 23rd. ”

“ Not only do we date our time from the exact year in which Christ is said to have been born, but our ecclesiastical calendar has determined with scrupulous minuteness the day and almost the hour at which every particular of Christ's wonderful life is stated to have happened. ”

“ The Church of Rome arranges her calendar so as to associate devotional feeling with the change of seasons — the hope of seed-time, joy of harvest, beauty of summer, repose of winter — profiting by their spiritual symbolisation, whereof man has an instinctive, though vague, apprehension, as is manifested in Polytheistic religions. ”

“ It is clear that the appointment of a Christian feast on the Charistia is another instance of the tendency to deprive the heathen festivals of their harmful character.
That this held good of the feast in question, and that a determined attempt was made to give it a Christian character, is shown by the fact that in other countries a different feast was appointed for this day. Polemius Silvius, Bishop of Sion, in the upper valley of the Rhone, composed a calendar for the year 448, the most ancient Christian calendar in existence, which he dedicated to Bishop Eucherius of Lyons. ”

“ The systematising tendency which arose at the end of the kingdom of Judah, and became ever stronger during and after the Exile, necessitated a calendar. If this tendency was unrelated to practical life, it was all the more closely bound up with the religious cult. Since people were now accustomed to numbering the months, the novelty consisted in the fixing of a calendarial beginning of the year. ”

“ The mother counts by weeks—very good—the squire by the proper calendar. One makes the child three months and two weeks, and she is right; the other deducts eleven days to fit the calendar, and he, too, is right.”
“Out with it,” cried Caleb; “out with such a calendar! Why, the whole realm will be in confusion. None of us will ever know how old we are, or when the church-days are due; but I doubt if, in spite of it all, the Pope’s new calendar doesn’t keep the squire’s rent-day straight. They’ll look out for that.” ”

“ Through the gradual spread of Christianity in non-Semitic lands in the West, the necessity must soon have arisen of fixing the day of the Resurrection by the Julian Calendar, and of deciding according to it the day [51] on which Easter had to be celebrated. But, as we have said, it is very difficult to transfer a date from the Jewish to the Julian Calendar, and, in most cases, quite impossible when the date is that of an event already long past. ”

“ Romans, after the first day of the month, began to reckon so many days before the Nones, as 4th, 3d, 2d, then Nones; after the Nones, so many days before the Ides, as 8th, 7th, 6th, etc., and after the Ides, so many before the Calends of the next month, the highest numbers being reckoned first.
In reducing the Roman calendar to our own, it should be remembered that in reckoning backward from a fixed point, that the point of departure is counted; also, that the last day of the month is not the point from which the Calends are reckoned, but the first day of the following month. ”

“ These documents are all dated in such and such a month of such and such a year of some king’s reign; the months are the same (at first under their earlier Accadian names [3] ) as those we [5] find in the almanacs translated by Epping and Strassmaier, and we meet in them, and in other historical inscriptions, with the intercalary months, the second Elul, and the second Adar. It would seem, then, that it was the same calendar, worked in the same way, that held its place through these two thousand years. ”

“ This equation gives the dominical letter of any year from the commencement of the era to the Reformation. In order to adapt it to the Gregorian calendar, we must first add the 10 days that were left out of the year 1582; in the second place we must add one day for every century that has elapsed since 1600, in consequence of the secular suppression of the intercalary day; and lastly we must deduct the units contained in a fourth of the same number, because every fourth centesimal year is still a leap year. ”

“ The following extract from a letter signed F., and dated Jan. 4, 1825, given in The Truthteller, vol. i. No. 16. p. 126., recommends the publication, among other works, of a "Catholic Calendar. There should also be a Catholic Calendar, something like The Perennial Calendar, but more portable, and fuller of religious information, in which, under each saint, his or her particular virtues, intelligence, good works, or martyrdom, should be succinctly set forth, so as to form a sort of calendar of human triumphs, such as is recommended by Mr. ”

“ Until 304 B.C. the lore of the calendaria remained the exclusive and lucrative monopoly of the priesthood; but in that year Gnaeus Flavius, a pontifical secretary, introduced the custom of publishing in the forum tables containing the requisite information, besides brief references to victories, triumphs, prodigies, &c. This list was the origin of the public Roman calendar, in which the days were divided into weeks of eight days each, and indicated by the letters A-H. Each day was marked by a certain letter to show its nature ”

“ St Michael the Archangel occurs eight times. Our Lady’s Nativity is celebrated on both the 26th April and the 7th September. No importance is to be attached to these repetitions; they are purely arbitrary, and are due to the desire to provide a name for every day in the calendar, and to fill up vacant places. [794] This appears especially from the [386] circumstance that on the 29th of every Egyptian month, corresponding to the 25th in the Julian Calendar, a commemoration of Christ’s Nativity is given, and on the 21st of each month a feast of our Lady (Commemoratio Dominæ S. Mariæ) . ”

“ The basis of this document is again the Roman Calendar, still many Frankish saints have been added, but Gereon alone of the saints of Cologne. The latest date given in it is the Dormitio S. Uodalrici (4th July) . It has only one name from the Old Testament, that of the prophet Ezechiel.
6. A calendar of Freising, drawn up under Bishop Abraham, between 893 and 993. The 25th March is marked as Conceptio Domini. There is only one feast of St Peter’s Chair. The calendar has been printed by [417] Lechler, “Mittelalterliche Kirchenfeste und Kalendarien in Bayern,” Freiburg, 1891. ”

“ In times when annual calendars, like our present ordos, had not yet appeared, their place was taken by the official calendar, and every one had to make out his ordo for himself with its assistance. From many points of view they are more important for our purpose than the martyrologies.
As complete missals took the place of the sacramentaries they were usually provided with a table, like an [411] index, which gave a list of the saints’ days contained in the missal ”

“ It spreads from pole to pole.”
h—Trinity Sunday, the octave, or eighth day of the feast of Pentecost, is a church festival held in commemoration of the doctrine of the Trinity. The introduction of this day into the calendar is of comparatively recent date, it being established by Pope Benedict XI, in the year of our Lord 1305. ”

“ The Roman calendar was in early times even more confused than the Greek. There appears to have been at one time a year of either 304 or 354 days; tradition assigned to Numa the introduction of a cycle of four years, which brought the calendar into fair agreement with the sun, but made the average length of the month considerably too short. Instead, however, of introducing further refinements the Romans cut the knot by entrusting to the ecclesiastical authorities the adjustment of the calendar from time to time, so as to make it agree with the sun and moon. ”

“ The chapter consists of two main elements which can easily be distinguished from one another, the one being derived from P and the other from H. To the former belongs the fuller and more elaborate description of vv. 4-8, 21, 23-38; to the latter, vv. 9-20, 22, 39-44. Characteristic of the priestly calendar are (1) the enumeration of “holy convocations,” (2) the prohibition of all work, (3) the careful determination of the date by the day and month, (4) the mention of “the offerings made by fire to Yahweh,” and (5) the stereotyped form of the regulations. ”

“ But in early days the proper adjustment of the calendar is a matter of religious concern, since on it depends a knowledge of the right seasons for propitiating the deities whose favour is indispensable to the welfare of the community. ”

“ The only calendar we men have is a calendar of dates, fitted to the movements of the sun and moon. God has a calendar, too, but it is a calendar of events, not of dates. The completion of His plans doesn't depend on so many revolutions of the earth about the sun, but on the faithful revolution of His followers in their movement around the earth telling men of Jesus. ”

“ He called it the Gregorian Calendar; but there are lots of other calendars besides—there's the Jewish and Mohammedan, and a variety of calendars in the East. All of them can't be right. The result is that none of them are right, and the world is in confusion. Some calendars mark off too many days, others mark off too few. Half the world is ahead of Time, and the other half behind it. ”

“ The spread of this feast seems to have been retarded, for it does not appear in many Calendars which contain the Assumption, i.e. in the Gotho-Gallican, in that of Luxeuil, in the Toledan Calendar of the tenth century, and in the Mozarabic; that it is not to be found in older Calendars goes without saying. On the other hand, it appears along with the Assumption in the Gelasianum and in the Frankish Calendars drawn up under Roman influence in the Carolingian period, the earliest being those of Reims and Bede. ”

“ CHAPTER IV. HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION OF THE JULIAN CALENDAR BY POPE GREGORY XIII.
True enough, the year in which Julius Cæsar reformed the ancient Roman calendar was the last year of confusion, and the method adopted by him a commodious one, and answered a very good purpose for a short time; but as the years rolled on and century after century had passed away, astronomers began to discover the discrepancy between the solar and the civil year ”

“ Thus at an early stage of culture the regulation of the calendar is largely an affair of religion: it is a means of maintaining the established relations between gods and men on a satisfactory footing ”

“ The times of the Birth and Passion of Christ, with such like niceties, being not material to religion, were little regarded by the Christians of the first age. They who began first to celebrate them, placed them in the cardinal periods of the year; as the annunciation of the Virgin Mary, on the 25th of March, which when Julius Cæsar corrected the Calendar was the vernal Equinox; the feast of John Baptist on the 24th of June, which was the summer Solstice; the feast of St. Michael on Sept. 29, which was the autumnal Equinox; and the birth of Christ on the winter Solstice, Decemb. ”

“ It has already been shown that every additional day causes the dominical letter to go back one place. As there are 366 days in leap-year, the letter must go back two places, one being used for January and February, and the other for the rest of the year. Did we continue one letter through the year and then go back two places, it would cause confusion in computation, unless the intercalation be made at the end of the year. Whenever the intercalation is made there must necessarily be a change in the dominical letter. ”