Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Ash Wednesday and St Valentine: for Catholic Answers

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I'm behind with my blogging, but here's something I wrote for Catholic Answers and some photos of an Ash Wednesday Mass.

The article begins:

The Church’s liturgical calendar throws up some oddities sometimes. One set of Sundays, and other feasts and fasts, is fixed in relation to Easter, which moves around the spring. Another of feasts is fixed to Christmas, and a third is fixed to calendar dates. And so different occasions can coincide: a feast of the “sanctoral cycle” can fall on a Sunday, and all the feasts of the spring and early summer are vulnerable to being swallowed up by the events of Lent and Eastertide.

A feast day like Christmas will fall on a Sunday only approximately once every seven years. Even less frequent are the occasions when significant dates of the sanctoral and paschal cycles coincide. The most famous of these occasional coincidences is that between Good Friday and the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25. It last happened in 2016 and will not happen again until 2157.

This year, we have the coincidence of Ash Wednesday and the traditional date of the feast of the Roman martyr St. Valentine.


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