The Church Year: Jan. 15, 2012

Today is the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time. The liturgical color is green.

In the Extraordinary Form, this is the season after Epiphany.

In the Extraordinary Form, it is the 2nd Sunday after Epiphany.

 

Saints & Celebrations:

Today, January 15, there is no special fixed liturgical day in the Ordinary Form.

In the Extraordinary Form, we celebrate St. Paul, first hermit, confessor, who died in A.D. 343. It is a Class III day.

If you’d like to learn more about St. Paul the hermit, you can click here.

For information about other saints, blesseds, and feasts celebrated today, you can click here.

 

Readings:

To see today’s readings in the Ordinary Form, you can click here.

Or you can click play to listen to them:

 

Devotional Information:

Sunday is the first and original Christian feast day. According to the Holy See’s Directory on Popular Piety:

Sunday

95. Since the “Lord’s day” is the “primordial feast” and “basis and centre of the liturgical year”, it cannot be subordinated to popular piety. Hence, pious exercises whose main chronological reference point is Sunday, should not be encouraged.

For the pastoral good of the faithful, it is, however, licit to take up on the Sundays “per annum” those celebrations of the Lord, or in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Saints which occur during the week and which are particularly significant in popular piety, provided that they have precedence over Sundays in the tables published with the Roman calendar.

Given that popular or cultural traditions can sometimes be invasive of the Sunday celebration and deprive it of its Christian character, “There is a need for special pastoral attention to the many situations where there is a risk that the popular and cultural traditions of a region may intrude upon the celebration of Sundays and other liturgical feast-days, mingling the spirit of genuine Christian faith with elements which are foreign to it and may distort it. In such cases, catechesis and well-chosen pastoral initiatives need to clarify these situations, eliminating all that is incompatible with the Gospel of Christ. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that these traditions C and, by analogy, some recent cultural initiatives in civil society C often embody values which are not difficult to integrate with the demands of faith. It rests with the discernment of Pastors to preserve the genuine values found in the culture of a particular social context and especially in popular piety, so that liturgical celebration C above all on Sundays and holy days C does not suffer but rather may actually benefit.”

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."