Today is Thursday of the 5th week in Ordinary Time. The liturgical color is green.
In the Extraordinary Form, this is the season after Septuagesima, and the liturgical color for today is white.
Saints & Celebrations:
On February 9, in the Extraordinary Form, we celebrate St. Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, confessor and doctor of the Church, who died in A.D. 444. It is a Class III day.
In the Extraordinary Form, we also celebrate St. Apollonia, virgin and martyr, who died in A.D. 259. This celebration is a commemoration.
If you’d like to learn more about St. Cyril, you can click here.
If you’d like to learn more about St. Apollonia, 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:
According to the Holy See’s Directory on Popular Piety:
The Sacred Constitution on the Liturgy
50. The relationship between the Liturgy and popular piety, in our times, must be approached primarily from the perspective of the directives contained in the constitutionSacrosactum Concilium, which seek to establish an harmonious relationship between both of these expressions of piety, in which popular piety is objectively subordinated to, and directed towards, the Liturgy.
Thus, it is important that the question of the relationship between popular piety and the Liturgy not be posed in terms of contradiction, equality or, indeed, of substitution. A realization of the primordial importance of the Liturgy, and the quest for its most authentic expressions, should never lead to neglect of the reality of popular piety, or to a lack of appreciation for it, nor any position that would regard it as superfluous to the Church’s worship or even injurious to it.
Lack of consideration for popular piety, or disrespect for it, often betrays an inadequate understanding of certain ecclesial realities and is not infrequently the product not so much of the doctrine of the faith, but of some ideologically inspired prejudice. These give rise to attitudes which:
- refuse to accept that popular piety itself is an ecclesial reality prompted and guided by the Holy Spirit;
- do not take sufficient account of the fruits of grace and sanctity which popular piety has produced, and continues to produce, within the ecclesial body;
- not infrequently reflect a quest for an illusory “pure Liturgy”, which, while not considering the subjective criteria used to determe purity, belongs more to the realm of ideal aspiration than to historical reality;
- and confound, “sense”, that noble component of the soul that legitimitatly permeates many expressions of liturgical and popular piety, and its degenerate form which is “sentimantality.”
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