The Church Year: Mar. 6, 2012

Today is Tuesday of the 2nd week of Lent. The liturgical color is violet.

 

Saints & Celebrations:

On March 6, there is no special fixed liturgical day in the Ordinary Form.

In the Extraordinary Form, we celebrate St.s Perpetua and Felicitas of Carthage, martyrs, who died in A.D. 202. It is a Class III day.

If you’d like to learn more about St.s Perpetua and Felicitas, 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 Via Matris [“Way of the Mother”]

136. As Christ and Our Lady of Dolours were associated in God’s saving plan (Lk 2, 34-35), so too they are associated in the Liturgy and popular piety.

As Christ was the “man of sorrows” (Is 53, 3) through whom it pleased God to have “reconciled all things through him and for him, everything in heaven and everything on earth, when he made peace by his death on the cross” (Col 1, 20), so too, Mary is “the woman of sorrows” whom God associated with his Son as mother and participant in his Passion (socia passionis).

Since the childhood of Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary’s life was entirely lived out under the sign of the sword (cf, Lk 2, 35). Christian piety has signalled out seven particular incidents of sorrow in her life, known as the “seven sorrows” of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Modelled on the Via Crucis [“Way of the Cross”], the pious exercise of the Via Matris dolorosae [“Way of the Mother of Sorrows”], or simply theVia Matris [“Way of the Mother”], developed and was subsequently approved by the Apostolic See. This pious exercise already existed in embryonic form since the sixteenth century, while its present form dates from the nineteenth century. Its fundamental intuition is a reflection on the life of Our Lady from the prophecy of Simeon (cf. Lk 2, 34-35), to the death and burial of her Son, in terms of a journey in faith and sorrow: this journey is articulated in seven “stations” corresponding to the “seven dolours” of the Mother of Our Savior.