The Church Year: Jan. 19, 2012

Today is Thursday of the 2nd week in Ordinary Time. The liturgical color is green.

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

 

Saints & Celebrations:

Today, January 19, there is no special fixed liturgical day in the Ordinary Form.

In the Extraordinary Form, we celebrate St.s Marius and Companions, martyrs, who died in A.D. 270. It is a commemoration.

In the Extraordinary Form, we also celebrate St. Canute, King of Denmark, martyr, who died in A.D. 1086. This celebration is also a commemoration.

If you’d like to learn more about St.s Marius and Companions, you can click here.

If you’d like to learn more about St. Canute, 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 Middle Ages

28. Among the main concerns of the Oriental Christian Churches, especially the Byzantine Church, of the middle ages, mention can be made of both phases of the struggles against the iconaclast heresy (725-787 and 815-843) which was a watershed for the Liturgy. It was also a period of classical commentaries on the Eucharistic Liturgy and on the iconography for buildings set aside for worship.

In the liturgical field, there was a noticeable increase in the Church’s iconographical patrimony and in her sacred rites which assumed a definitive form. The Liturgy reflected the symbolic vision of the universe and a sacral hierarchical vision of the world. In this vision, we have the coalescence of all orders of Christian society, the ideals and structures of monasticism, popular aspirations, the intuitions of the mystics and the precepts of the ascetics.

With the decree De sacris imaginibus of the Second Council of Niceaand the resolution of the iconaclastic controversy in the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” , icognagraphy, having been given doctrinal legitimacy, developed and organized its definitive form. The icon, hieratic and pregnant with symbolic power, itself became part of the celebration of the Liturgy, reflecting, as it did, the mystery celebrated and retaining something of its permanent presence which was exposed for the veneration of the faithful.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download