The Church Year: Apr. 13, 2012

Today is Friday within the octave of Easter. The liturgical color is white.

Saints & Celebrations:

On April 13, in the Ordinary Form, we celebrate St. Martin I, pope and martyr. It is an optional memorial.

In the Extraordinary Form, we celebrate St. Hermenegild, martyred at Seville, who died in A.D. 586. It is a Class III day.

If you’d like to learn more about St. Martin I, you can click here.

If you’d like to learn more about St. Hermenegild, 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:

84. Popular piety, as an expression of ecclesial piety, is subject to the general discipline of Christian worship and to the Church’s pastoral authority which exercises a role of discernment and authentification in relation to it. The Church renews popular piety by placing it in fertile contact with the revealed Word, tradition and the Sacred Liturgy itself.

On the other hand, expressions of popular piety must always be open to the “ecclesiological principle” of Christian worship. In this way:

• popular piety can have a correct understanding of the relationship between the particular Church and the universal Church. When popular piety concentrates on local or immediate issues, it risks closing itself to universal values and to ecclesiological perspectives;
• the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of the Angels and Saints, and suffrage for the dead, should be set in the vast context of the relationship between the heavenly Church and the pilgrim Church on earth;
• the relationship between ministry and charism should be properly understood, while the former is necessary for divine worship, the latter is frequently found in manifestations of popular piety.

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