Evangelical Catholicism by George Weigel

Author:George Weigel [Weigel, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465038916
Publisher: Basic Books

Liturgical Time as Countercultural Time

Postmodernity flattens and profanes time: thus the Sabbath becomes the “weekend,” Advent and Christmas become “the holidays,” Easter is the “Spring Festival,” and so forth. Evangelical Catholicism, by contrast, lives in time in order to prepare the people of the Church for the time beyond time that is the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in the Kingdom of God. Rather than accommodating the conventions of secular time by transferring some holy days to Sundays and canceling other holy days of obligation when they fall near Sundays, the liturgical calendar of twenty-first-century Evangelical Catholicism should be deliberately countercultural, embodying a distinct way of life that points beyond the flattened “now” of a world without transcendence to the eschatological horizon of a future in which “God [is] everything to everyone” [1 Corinthians 15.28].

Thus the reform of the reform of the liturgical calendar ought to begin with the restoration of Sundays after Epiphany and Sundays after Pentecost, and the suppression of Sundays of “Ordinary Time.” There is nothing “ordinary” about Sunday, the weekly festival of the Resurrection, the eighth day of the New Creation and the Sabbath of the New Covenant. Nor is there anything “ordinary” about the Sundays after the Epiphany—the great solemnity of the Lord’s manifestation to the world and to history—and Pentecost—the birthday of the Church and the beginning of the mission to the nations. Catholics who live in the “time of the Church” will live in the penumbra of those two great feasts and will know that they are not “ordinary” in so living.

The restoration of Sundays after Epiphany will also permit a return to biblical and liturgical clarity in the celebration of the Christmas season, which has been turned impossibly inside-out by the transfer of Epiphany to Sunday and the imperative of beginning “Ordinary Time” immediately after the Solemnity of the Baptism of the Lord. Consider, for example, the thoroughly confused sequence of Gospel readings in 2010, according to the liturgical calendar in force at the time:

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