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The Value and Increasing use of the Church Year
The Christian Year is as old as the Resurrection of our Lord and as new as the latest revisions and events within the Church.
The Anglican, the Roman, the Greek Orthodox and the Lutheran churches have followed this Christian Year, each making its own distinctive contributions. The new emphasis of our day on worship, beauty, architecture and ecumenism is bringing the Christian Year into even wider usage among all Christians.
Four weeks of Advent ("Coming") are devoted to preparation for the Feast of the Nativity (Christmas) - and the preparation for His second coming, in majesty, to judge the world. Then, following the events of his earthly life of self-sacrifice, we celebrate His Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, and the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost (Whitsunday). The second half of the Church Year is co-ordinate with the first, since it celebrates the continuing work of christ, in His Church, by the Spirit..
Certain days are fixed dates, others are movable, depending upon the date of Easter. Easter falls on the Snday after the 14th day of the Paschal moon - that is the Calendar moon whose 14th day falls on, or follows next after, the vernal equinox, March 21st.
In addition to events in our Blessed Lord's life, certain saints and martyrs are commemorated - and prayer is made to Almighty God that we follow their good example of faithfulness, even unto death.
Holy Eucharist
On Sundays, the Proper is used whether the principal service is an Office or the Eucharist and when the Office is used in place of all that precedes the Peace and Offertory at the Eucharistic celebration.
The Liturgical Colors
As God has flooded earth and sky with color, so the Church has sensed the symbolic use of color in its worship. As dominating color in nature change with the seasons of the fourfold year, so in the Church Year there is a structured change in the colors of the Eucharistic vestments, the liturgical colors.
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White
Symbolizing joy, purity and truth, is used on the Sundays and open days of Christmastide and Paschaltide; on all Solemnities except Pentecost and Holy Cross Day; Feasts, Memorials and Votive Masses of the Blessed Virgin, the angels, and saints who were not martyrs; Nativity of St. John Baptist, Confession of St. Peter, Conversion of St. Paul, Independence Day and Thanksgiving Day; Ritual Masses for Baptism and Matrimony, and optionally for Confirmation; and Votive Masses of our Lord, the Holy Trinity and the Eucharist, and optionally for Masses for the Daed. Gold is sometimes used in place of white on major feasts.
Red
The color of fire and of blood, is used on Pentecost; optionally on Palm Sunday and Good Friday; feasts and Votives of the Passion of our Lord and of the birthday feasts of the Apostles and Eveangelists; feasts and votives of the Martyrs; Votives of the Holy Spirit; Ritual Masses for Ordination and optinally for Confirmation.
Green
The color of living things and of God's creation, is used on the Sundays and ferias in the season after Epiphany and Pentecost.
Violet
Symbolic of penitence and expectation, is used in the seasons of Advent and Lent; for Votives penitential in nature or for the gift of healing; for Penance and Unction; and may also be used for the offices and Masses for the dead, and on Ember and Rogation Days.
Black
Representative of deep sorrow, may be used for Good Friday and for offices and Masses for the dead.
Rose
Penitence permeated with joy, may be used on the Third Sunday of Advent and the Fourth Sunday in Lent
Blue
In the lighter shades, is sometimes used on feasts of the Blessed Virgin. In the darker shades of indigo, blue is frequently used during Advent.
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Rogation days are, in the calendar of the Western Church, four days traditionally set apart for solemn processions to invoke God's mercy. They are April 25, the Major Rogation, coinciding with St. Mark's Day (but having no connection with it); and the three days preceding Ascension Day, the Minor Rogations.
The first Rogation, the Greater Litanies, has been compared to the ancient Roman religious festival of the "Robigalia", held on April 25 (Feast of St. Mark.). Its main ritual was a dog sacrifice to protect grain fields from disease. Games in the form of “major and minor” races were held. The "Robigalia" was one of several agricultural festivals in April to celebrate and vitalize the growing season, but the darker sacrificial elements of these occasions are also fraught with anxiety about crop failure and the dependence on divine favor to avert it.
The first Rogation was also observed on April 25, and a direct connection has sometimes been asserted, with the Christian substitute following the same processional route in Rome. If Easter falls on April 24 or on this day (the latest possible date for Easter), the Rogations are transferred to the following Tuesday.
The second set of Rogation days, the Lesser Litanies or Rogations, introduced about AD 470 by Bishop Mamertus of Vienne and eventually adopted elsewhere, are the three days (Rogation Monday, Rogation Tuesday and Rogation Wednesday) immediately before Ascension Thursday in the Christian liturgical calendar. The term “lesser,” most frequently encountered in Roman Catholic and Anglican circles, is rarely used today.
The word “Rogation” comes from the Latin verb rogare, meaning “to ask,” and was applied to this time of the liturgical year because the Gospel reading for the previous Sunday included the passage “Ask and ye shall receive” (John 16:24). The Sunday itself was often called Rogation Sunday as a result, and marked the start of a three-week period (ending on Trinity Sunday), when Roman Catholic and Anglican clergy did not solemnize marriages (two other such periods of marital prohibition also formerly existed, one beginning on the first Sunday in Advent and continuing through the Octave of Epiphany, or 13 January, and the other running from Septuagesima until the Octave of Easter, the Sunday after Easter. (Septuagesima is the name for the ninth Sunday before Easter, the third before Ash Wednesday. The term is sometimes applied also to the period that begins on this day and ends on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, when Lent begins. This period is also known as the pre-Lenten season or Shrovetide. The other two Sundays in this period of the liturgical year are called Sexagesima and Quinquagesima, the latter sometimes also called Shrove Sunday Septuagesima comes from the Latin word for seventieth with Sexagesima and Quinquagesima equaling sixtieth and fiftieth respectively. They are patterned after the Latin word for the season of Lent, Quadragesima, which means fortieth, as Lent is forty days long excluding Sundays.) In England, Rogation Sunday is called Chestnut Sunday.
The faithful typically observed the Rogation days by fasting in preparation to celebrate the Ascension, and farmers often had their crops blessed by a priest at this time, which always occurs during the spring in the Northern Hemisphere. Violet vestments are worn at the rogation litany and its associated Mass, regardless of what color was worn at the ordinary liturgies of the day.
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In former times when maps were rare, it was usual to make a formal perambulation of the parish boundaries on Ascension Day or during Rogation week. Knowledge of the limits of each parish needed to be handed down so that such matters as liability to contribute to the repair of the church, and the right to be buried within the churchyard were not disputed. The relevant jurisdiction was that of the ecclesiastical courts. The priest of the parish with the churchwardens and the parochial officials headed a crowd of boys who, armed with green boughs, usually birch or willow, beat the parish boundary markers with them. Sometimes the boys were themselves whipped or even violently bumped on the boundary-stones to make them remember. The object of taking boys is supposed to ensure that witnesses to the boundaries should survive as long as possible. Priests would pray for its protection in the forthcoming year and often Psalms 103 and 104 were recited, and the priest would say such
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sentences as “Cursed is he who transgresseth the bounds or doles of his neighbor.” Hymns would be sung and a number of hymns are titled for their role. Many places in the English countryside bear names such as 'Gospel Oak' testifying to their role in the beating of the bounds.
The ceremony had an important practical purpose. Checking the boundaries was a way of preventing encroachment by neighbors; sometimes boundary markers would be moved, or lines obscured, and a folk memory of the true extent of the parish was necessary to maintain integrity of borders by embedding knowledge in oral traditions.
The reform of the Liturgical Calendar for Latin Roman Catholics in 1969 delegated the establishment of Rogation Days, along with Ember Days, to the episcopal conferences. Their observance in the Latin Church subsequently declined, but the observance has revived somewhat since 1988 (when Pope John Paul II issued his decree "Ecclesia Dei Adflicta") and especially since 2007 (when Pope Benedict XVI issued his motu proprio called "Summorum Pontificum") when the use of older rites was encouraged. Churches of the Anglican Communion reformed their liturgical calendar in 1976, but continue to recognize the three days before Ascension as an optional observance.
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