THE
P RTAL
May 2016
Page 19
Are Holy Days of
Obligation a thing
of the past?
Fr Julian Green makes a plea for them to be kept
on the day, rather than being transferred to the nearest Sunday
My great
reminiscence about Ascension Day belongs to my days at my worthy northern grammar
school. A few days before the day itself, one had to give one’s name to the prefect who had been given
charge of drawing up a list of boys who wished to attend the morning Holy Communion service at the
Anglican church next door to the school.
It was the right of any boy who wished to miss the
first class and go along to the middle of the road,
Book of Common Prayer service, led by the kindly
but scholarly vicar. Once I had ascended to the rank
of prefect, it became my responsibility to collect
the names and inform the masters. This was a duty I
took very seriously and tried to persuade as many boys
as possible to go along.
Once I had become a Catholic at university, Holy
Days of Obligation were an inconvenience, but one
which we gladly bore, proud to be making time in the
busy schedule of socialising and essay writing for the
sacrifice of the Mass. This was a duty taken into the
world of work, where I would manage to ‘get a Mass in’
during the lunch hour by driving at break neck speed
to the Church in the city centre. Once at seminary, a
Holy Day such as the Ascension was a dies non with late
rise and later Mass, with the possibility of lunch out in
town in Valladolid, taking in a few bars afterwards.
I believe we have lost a great deal by eradicating
the Holy Days of Obligation. Not only is it the
worthiness of the effort taken to practise one’s faith
in a contrary culture, but also the sanctification of
days other than Sunday, breaking the daily habits,
allowing the practice of the Faith to break in to the
daily routine, to upset plans, so that God might be
glorified. I believe that the ‘pastoral reasons’ for
robbing us of most of the Holy Days has been to
make allowances for the growing trend to abandon
the idea of ‘obligation’ in regard to even the Sunday
observance, and for people to go to Mass only
when there is nothing else to do which trumps it on
one’s personal scale of priorities. So much for the
Church of the apostles and martyrs, the Church of
the Recusants, the Church of the New Evangelisation.
Welcome to consumer church.
contents page
What is lost in the case of the Ascension is much
more even than this. The Lord ascended into heaven
on the fortieth day after his Resurrection, not the fortythird. This left the apostles at prayer with Our Lady
in the cenacle for nine clear days before the coming
of the Holy Spirit, those nine days which have shaped
the great Catholic tradition of novenas. The Pentecost
Novena, which now has to begin before the Lord has
liturgically ascended, is the foremost novena and one
which we were encouraged by the great Pope Leo XIII,
in his encyclical Divinum illud, to keep annually.
While we may all differ on the forms that we believe
ecumenism should take, there is one thing that is
certain: that the keeping of feast days and celebrations
on a common day is a very basic level of ecumenical
convergence. I have experienced comments made by
Anglicans surprised by the Catholic Church’s divergence
from tradition and common practice simply to make
fulfilling an obligation less burdensome, particularly
in relation to both the Ascension and Epiphany. But
quite apart from the relationship with ‘separated
brethren’, it is odd that in the Catholic Church, which
prides itself on its universality, that such important
feasts of the Lord can be on different days in different
countries, and, in the case of Italy and the four major
Basilicas of Rome, even churches next to each other
keeping these key celebrations on different days. It is
possible to travel from one country to another and
keep the Ascension twice, and also, travelling in the
other direction, not to keep it at all.
I pray that one day we may have enough faith, desire
for tradition and universality, allowing our practice of
the Faith to be so important to us that we keep not
only Ascension Thursday, but many more feasts of the
liturgical year gladly and willingly, placing the mystery
of Christ first in our list of priorities.