Monday, October 29, 2007

An Inconvenient Truth

Terry Nelson discusses the inconvenience of having two calendars, the traditional one and the Novus Ordo one. I remember how one year I missed celebrating the feast of the Epiphany, since I went to an indult Mass on the Sunday on which Epiphany is celebrated in the USA, but instead they were celebrating the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, according to the old calendar. At the church I attended during the week, there was no Mass of the Epiphany on Jan 6, since they had all celebrated the Epiphany on the previous Sunday. I found this to be quite distressing at the time….Although another year I got to celebrate the Immaculate Conception twice, since at the indult parish in Pittsburgh they celebrated it on December 8, which was a Sunday, and at the mainstream parish it had been transferred to a weekday. Since we also sometimes went to the local Byzantine church, for a while we were dealing with three calendars. Now, as much as I love the traditional Mass, I follow the new calendar, the one observed by the Pope and by my parish.

Meanwhile, the traditional Latin Mass is spreading. (Via the NOR) May God be praised!

Oh, what interesting times! Share

4 comments:

Terry Nelson said...

Thanks for the link Elena!

Anonymous said...

When I was a freshman in college, I celebrated the Feast of the Ascension twice. The Archdiocese of Baltimore, along with four other dioceses, transferred the feast day from a weekday to a Sunday.
As I was attending college within the Archdiocese of Boston, MA, I went to Mass on a Thursday. After I came home for the summer, I celebrated the Ascension on Sunday at my home parish.
It was a throw off indeed!

Anonymous said...

Elena, this post and Terry's post are exactly the type of problem I was concerned about in my comment re: your prior post http://teaattrianon.blogspot.com/2007/
10/11000-virgins.html

We only follow the novus ordo calendar & readings - no TLM near us and I don't know enough about the traditional calendar and practices to follow it properly. But just following the novus ordo calendar alone, when traveling on several separate occasions, we have missed holy days. We lived in a diocese that celebrated it on Sunday and traveled to dioceses that celebrated it on Thursday, or vice versa.

I am sure that other people such as businessmen have been impacted by this as well. It would be nice if all the dioceses would just stick to the original holy day plan. I don't see why we need to be reducing the number of holy days of obligation or always moving them around to Sundays.

Goodness, then if you added following the traditional calendar to the mix, that could really confuse things at times!

elena maria vidal said...

You are welcome, Terry!

I have had things like that happen, Elisa!

Yes, Margaret, it is so confusing now when from state to state the calendar is different. Someone can easily miss the feast of the Ascension if traveling. And then when some Holy days are dropped so that people will not be inconvenienced with going to Mass two days in a row. I really hope the calendar gets straightened out soon.....