Some Thoughts on the Calendar

It occured to me, when I had finally drunk enough coffee to achieve consciousness last Sunday, that my parish was in the relatively small number of churches that would be celebrating the feast of St Mark. This illustrated two points for me. Firstly, that the English Reformers were relatively conservative in their treatment of the Calendar; and secondly, that the position of the saints in the liturgy was actually diminished by the liturgical reform of the 1950s and 60s.

As you may know, the traditional BCP Calendar divides the liturgical days into four categories:

Greater Sundays - Advent, the 'Gesimas, Lent, Easter, Low Sunday, Pentecost and Trinity Sundays
Red Letter Days - the major holy days that have a Collect, Epistle and Gospel in the 1928 BCP
Lesser Sundays - that is, everything not named above.
Other days - such as Thanksgiving Day, Rogation Days, etc.

It should be noted that the above list is in the order of their importance, which is something that becomes important when a holy day and a Sunday fall on the same day. What is celebrated is decided by the Table of Occurrence in the Prayer Book, but its principles can be fairly summarized by saying that Greater Sundays are never displaced by a feast; but a Lesser Sunday gives place to a major holy day. Hence, on Sunday April 25th, Traditional Anglicans - or at least those who have read pages i & li of the 1928 BCP - found themselves celebrating St Mark rather than Easter III-something that Roman Catholics have not done since the mid-1950s. Those Roman Rite parishes which use the Extraordinary Form (i.e. the 1960/62 redaction of the Tridentine books) in spite of their professed traditionalism did not observe St Mark, but rather Easter III with a mere Commemoration of St Mark. This means that about the only other churches celebrating St Mark last Sunday were some very traditional Lutherans and the Sede-Vacantists! In the latter case, that make me hope that I am not judged by the liturgical company I keep!

This observance of the saint instead of the Sunday points to a certain level of traditionalism on the part of Cranmer and the other compilers and revisers of the BCP. It would have been so easy to sweep the saints under the carpet in 1549/1552, but instead Cranmer gave Biblical saints, the Apostles and Evangelists, enough prominence in the new liturgy that their feasts continue to displace Lesser Sundays in the Church year. This meant that even "casual Anglicans" continued to hear about the wonderful works of God as revealed in His saints.

Then, as the coffee was good and strong, a second point that occurred to me - that liturgical reform has significantly downgraded the saints -applies to both the Anglican and Roman Liturgies.

Like Thomas Cranmer, St. Pius V's revision committee made a point of pruning the Calendar so that the Sunday Office and Mass would be heard with some frequency, just as it had been in the early Middle Ages. In the Roman Church subsequent developments allowed the number of high ranking feasts to again grow to the point where the Sunday Office was rarely heard. A major part of St. Pius X's reform of both Missal and Breviary was altering the rubrics so that Lesser Sundays gained precedence over all but the most important feasts.

This created, or rather restored the situation where the usual Sunday service was that of the Sunday, but the Apostles and the most important saints still occasionally get a look in on Sundays. To my mind, the BCP and the Pius X editions of both the Breviary and the Missal achieve the perfect balance; the Sunday service predominates on Sundays, but two or three times a year one of the great saints of the Church replaces the Sunday office to the edification of all involved.

However, the modernizers and rationalizers could not rest content with the Roman Reform of 1908-13 and the Anglican BCPs of 1662-1928. The saints had to be displaced completely from the Sunday Liturgy. This ideal was achieved in the 1950s and 60s. In the Roman Church, the reforms of the Calendar initiated by Pius XII upgraded the rank of the Sunday Office so that it could be displaced only by the feasts of Our Lord and Our Lady; then in the 1970 Calendar the number of feasts important enough to displace a Sunday is reduced. In Anglican circles, the number of minor saints days is multiplied, but major saints days falling on a Sunday are now usually transferred rather than observed. This means that "the average Sunday Church-goer" now hears very little about the saints, which means that they hear very little about the heroes of the Church.

This downgrading of the saints is not a completely healthy development, because it robs the ordinary churchgoer of their chance to meditate upon the lives of great Christians. All of us have a stage in our lives when we need heroes, and this is particularly true of adolescent males - a group frequently lost to the Church. Our "Christian heroes," the saints, were ordinary men and women who, through the Grace of God, have done extraordinary things, and being like us, they can inspire us to be like them. We also loose a valuable opportunity to reflect on the historical foundation of our Faith. Christianity is grounded in an historical fact - the resurrection of Christ - so if we want to combat the idea that Christianity is just another version of "the Great Cosmic Myth (TM)" we need every chance we can get to emphasize is historical basis.