We just celebrated the Solemnity of the Assumption. Why was it a holy day of obligation?
Because it was a Tuesday.
Why wasn’t it last year?
Because it was a Monday.
Why won’t the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God (a.k.a, New Year’s Day) be a holy day next January 1? Because it falls on a Monday. This year, because it fell on a Sunday, it was a holy day of obligation.
And you thought they should be holy days because it might actually have something to do with the significance of whom we were celebrating!
If you are confused, don’t be: it owes to the lunacy of the liturgical calendar for the United States.
A 1991 “decree” of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops declared Mary, Mother of God, the Assumption, and All Saints Day to be holy days of obligation (the “obligation” being to attend Mass) unless they fall on a Saturday or Monday, in which case they’re not.
Why this “Saturday-or-Monday time out” rule? The answer depends.
One “practical” answer is that some bishops considered “double-header” days of obligation, i.e., a holy day and Sunday, to be too burdensome, on the faithful to go to Mass and on fewer priests to celebrate them. So, they chose to eliminate some “burdens.”
If you want to get even more technical, some liturgists didn’t like a solemnity and a Sunday abutting each other. In the Church’s Liturgy of the Hours, solemnities (which include each Sunday) begin with Evening Prayer I the night before (e.g., Saturday Evening Prayer for Sunday) and end with Evening Prayer II on the solemnity (e.g., Sunday Evening Prayer). Liturgists didn’t like the overlap, even though an ecclesiastical mechanism, the “precedence of feasts,” adjudicated any conflict.
Of course, “theoretical” solutions rarely explain the “real” motives behind them.
From what this author remembers, there was a debate between two factions among the bishops—those that wanted to continue “pastoral adaptations” to account for people’s behavior, i.e., ignoring the holy days by not going to Mass versus those who thought accommodation of secularization had gone far enough, to the loss of distinctive Catholic practices (like Friday abstinence) and the spiritual values they embodied.
In the name of good ecclesiastical comity (for it would certainly be “unbecoming” to have a raucous old fight between bishops like, say they did back at Nicaea) this compromise was cobbled together.
Canon law now requires everybody to observe Christmas on December 25—even if it falls on Monday (like this year)—which exposes the illogic of the “burdens” and “abutting solemnities” arguments.
The clergy and faithful are obviously expected to celebrate and participate in Mass for the Fourth Sunday of Advent (including the Saturday Night anticipated Mass and Sunday morning Masses) as well as Christmas Masses later that Sunday (the Christmas Vigil late on that Sunday afternoon and Midnight Mass at 12:00 am Sunday-to-Monday) as well as a schedule of Christmas Masses.
(The really fervent or formalists might even throw in time for some Christmas Eve confessions.)
On top of that, priests actually can pray the Breviary without confronting dueling “Evening Prayers.”
It’s a good thing the bishops decided to be “pastoral” and not impose a similar cross the following week for Mary, Mother of God (January 1). After all, God does not test us beyond our endurance!
(Of course, another excuse for the partial “abrogation” of some holy days and the reason some bishops wanted to remove them all was that requiring people to attend Mass on a working weekday was also considered “burdensome.” Given the fact that virtually nobody works on January 1, the abrogation of the obligation for that feast exposes the fallacy behind this arrangement).
Another interesting adaptation of the bishops in the United States was the “geographying” of Ascension Thursday. Again, because some bishops wanted to cancel the obligation while others to retain it, the compromise thrown together there depends on location: if the bishops of a particular ecclesiastical province (a metropolitan archdiocese and its suffragan dioceses) want to keep the Solemnity of the Ascension on its historic Thursday, fine; if not, they can move it to the next Sunday (effectively eliminating the Seventh Sunday of Easter).
Now, some bishops have proclivities for celebrating Mass on borders. Let’s pose a theoretical question: if the bishops of Camden and Wilmington decided to have Mass on Ascension Thursday in the middle of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, would it be a holy day or not? It is in New Jersey; it isn’t in Delaware. Does the obligation depend on the direction from whence the “presidential procession” came?
The Ascension is, of course, not the only casualty of the “transfer-solemnities-to-Sundays” mentality of the “pastoral adaptationists.” Epiphany and Corpus Christi have long been disconnected in the United States from their proper dates. The only difference is: neither of those solemnities had ever been holy days in the United States (though they were in much of the rest of the Church).
Such transfer legerdemain, of course, causes other damage. January 6 is “12th Night.” January 2-8 is “Ninth” to “14th Night.” Ascension is the 40th day after Easter; its significance in the Easter Season of Feasts is downplayed when shifted to the 43rd day.
The original period between Ascension and Pentecost provided the pattern for the popular devotion called the “novena,” another victim of “liturgical renewal.” Even more importantly, it undermines a spiritual principle: when Jesus told His Apostles to wait in Jerusalem for the Holy Spirit, He didn’t say how long nor caveat it “provided it’s convenient.”
Ascension should teach us to keep the Lord’s schedule; its adaptation teaches us to trump His by ours.
Of course, you can solve the whole problem and go to Hawaii where, by special rescript, Christmas and Immaculate Conception are the only holy days of obligation in the fiftieth state, so it can mirror Pacific Island practice.
By the way, Immaculate Conception seems to have been saved from the “Saturday-or-Monday” rule by the principle that every country should have a holy day of obligation in addition to Christmas.
So, as our patronal feast, December 8 is obligatory, regardless of whatever day it falls on and whether Catholics in the United States actually understand whose conception they are celebrating.
Taking a step back, this mishmash of liturgical adaptation actually offers at least two lessons relevant to our contemporaries.
First, despite regular bemoaning by Pope Francis, numerous Vaticanistas, and multiple Synodal types channeling the “Spirit” against “clericalism,” the American ecclesiastical calendar cacophony is pure and simple clericalism. It makes almost no liturgical sense, it undermines the meaning of the feasts, and it arguably advances their further marginalization by adapting to secular time rhythms.
To adapt language from Justice Byron White’s memorable dissent in Roe v. Wade, this whole edifice stands on an “exercise of raw clerical power.”
Liturgical and spiritual integrity is sacrificed to compliance to canonical discipline driven by whether the precept to attend Mass applies. Many of those whose mentality at the time of Vatican II would have bemoaned Catholics’ “rote” adherence to Mass attendance out of “fear” have, in fact, reduced our holy day arrangements to just a matter of canon law.
Second, the current American arrangement shows the incoherence of “pastoral practice” disconnected from theology, including liturgical theology, dogma, and spiritual theology.
That “pastoral adaptation” doesn’t help the faithful to resist secularization: it accommodates it. It doesn’t bolster the breadth of their faith; it just assures them they’re not “committing a sin.” (Maybe it also assuages some scrupulous bishops who might think lax parochial practice cooperates in sins of non-attendance).
The author is fully aware that his rant is likely to change nothing. The current arrangement has perdured for thirty years and, with Mass attendance plummeting among younger Catholics and still not recovered from the “field hospital’s” COVID battlefield retreat, today’s “pastoral types” will conclude this is “realistically” the “best we can do,” so live with it.
I won’t be so impolite as to point out that the bishops of the United States, who gathered in council in nineteenth-century Baltimore, prescribed six holydays of obligation.
They did that for a country which was still at that time mission territory, also arguably lacked priests, and was bereft of modern means of transportation (cars and interstates) to get to church.
Mentioning that historical fact might get me accused of being indietristi, a “backwardist” who doesn’t “accommodate pastoral needs” regardless of what history might teach us about those accommodationist strategies’ fruits.
Two parting thoughts: others have documented and I have elsewhere summarized that, despite the myth of Saturday-night-for-Sunday Masses as “vigils” and “mirroring Jewish practice of the day beginning at sunset,” the actual history of the origin of that practice had nothing to do with those arguments.
They, arguably, were first were practiced in the 1960s, after Pius XII had liberalized the Eucharistic fast, to “pastorally accommodate” skiers in northern Italy who wanted to maximize slope time in more remote areas removed from Alpine villages (and their churches).
Is it fair to ask whether this “accommodation” has in fact subordinated the Lord’s Day to the weekend?
Paradoxically, when Congress enacted the Uniform Holiday Act of 1968 that shifted several federal holidays from historical dates to fixed Mondays, much of the “history” was lost, the gravamen for observing those holidays becoming “long weekends” and “sales.”
(Let’s be honest: how many Americans mark Washington’s Birthday AKA “President’s Day” as anything connected with the 45 men who have led this country?)
One must ask whether another dirty little secret is, in contrast to Monday federal holidays making long weekends, evicting some holy days from Saturdays or Mondays also served to keep the “weekend” from getting too sacred?