Category: Liturgical Year

A reader writes:

Lent is a time of following the Lord’s 40 days and 40 nights in the desert; a time of self-denial and penance, leading to new life at Easter. The point of this time period is to spend 40 days in spiritual discipline. If you count from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday (inclusive), but excluding Sundays, you arrive at 40. Again, the point is to spend 40 days of penance before Easter. That the number 40 neatly fits within the technical bounds of Lent is not, it seems to me, the point. Counting in this fashion is yet another support to the notion that Sundays, though certainly within the season of Lent, are not observed as days of penance, but rather days of celebrating the Lord’s Day.

It is true, poetically speaking, that "Lent is a time of following the Lord’s 40 days and 40 nights in the desert; a time of self-denial and penance, leading to new life at Easter." However, the Church’s law does not appear to support the claim that "The point of this time period is to spend 40 days in spiritual discipline . . . before Easter." As noted above, there are more than forty penitential days in this period, and penitential days are days of spiritual discipline. I don’t think that the Church would regard any particular number of days as "the point," but it has established more than forty in this period.

It is true that "If you count from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday (inclusive), but excluding Sundays, you arrive at 40," but this does not correspond to the Church’s law. One can say that "Counting in this fashion is yet another support to the notion that Sundays, though certainly within the season of Lent, are not observed as days of penance, but rather days of celebrating the Lord’s Day," but this posits a false opposition between Sunday being a day of celebration and Sunday being a day of penance. It can be, and during Lent is, both.

The Church’s law is clear that Sundays in Lent both involve the celebration of the Resurrection and the practice of penitence. The penitential practice of the Church is even reflected in the liturgy on Sundays of Lent, as illustrated by the fact that the Gloria and the Alleluia are omitted, purple vestments are worn, and special readings (e.g., this coming Sunday is the "unless you repent you also will perish" passage). It’s also worth noting that, as the General Instruction provides, "Rose may be used, where it is the practice, on Gaudete Sunday (Third Sunday of Advent) and on Laetare Sunday (Fourth Sunday of Lent)" (GIRM 346f). The standard interpretation of the use of rose vestments on Laetare Sunday is that it is a lessening of the penance that is already in place.

The decisive fact, though, is simply that the law (quoted above) provides that "The penitential days and times in the universal Church are every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent." It doesn’t say "except Sundays."

Hope this helps!

A reader writes:

For whatever it may be worth…

Ash Wednesday (inclusive) through Holy Saturday (inclusive), less Sundays, would yield a count of 40 days.

So, if you’re skipping Sundays (dealt with in another post), you could say that there are 40 penitential days between Ash Wednesday and Easter. Note, though, that this little system would consider the Solemnities of Saint Joseph and the Annunciation as 2 of the 40 days – hardly days of penance in most minds.

I appreciate the effort and ingenuity involved in this solution, but it does not appear to correspond to the Church’s law. It is true that "if you’re skipping Sundays (dealt with in another post), you could say that there are 40 penitential days between Ash Wednesday and Easter," but one would be making up one’s own rules to get this total. The Church’s law is different on this point. According to the Code of Canon Law:

The penitential days and times in the universal Church are every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent [Canon 1250].

The limits of the season of Lent are defined as follows:

"Lent runs from Ash Wednesday until the Mass of the Lord’s Supper exclusive [General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar 28].

This means, as we saw below, that Lent includes forty four days of penance. If you want to have the number of "penitential days between Ash Wednesday and Easter," then the total will be forty five because Good Friday is also a day of penance under Canon 1250. (Holy Saturday, while it is a day on which fasting is recommended, is not technically a days of penance in the law.)

A reader writes:

The suspension of penitential practice on Sundays, I would think, is more than just one option among many. I would say that the Catholic devotional and liturgical tradition, taken as a whole, inveighs against any attempt to practice penance on the Lord’s Day.

In the Liturgy of the Hours, every Sunday of Lent begins with this reading from Lauds:

Today is holy to the Lord your God. Do not be sad, and do not weep; for today is holy to our Lord. Do not be saddened this day, for rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength! (Nehemiah 8: 9, 10).

The disposition demanded by this reading seems incompatible with normal penitential practices. Your take on the matter?

I would say that "inveighs" is too strong a term, especially when one is speaking of "any attempt to practice penance on the Lord’s Day" (see below on Sundays as days of penance). I also would say that "demands" is too strong a term for what the reading from Nehemiah is doing regarding our dispositions. The disposition described in Nehemiah is applicable to a particular historical situation, and the Liturgy of the Hours holds it up to us as something to be emulated to the extent our situation mirrors the one in which it was demanded–a mirroring which is only partial.

I would say, however, that the nature of Sunday as the day of commemorating the Resurrection of Our Lord makes it reasonable and even suitable to modify penitential practices on that day. It is certainly more reasonable to lessen penitential practices on Sunday than it would be, for example, on Monday. So if you are going to lighten up on yourself on a weekday of Lent, that would be the day to do it. However, Sundays remain days of penance, and if someone chooses to continue their Lenten penitential practice on Sundays while still celebrating it the way that the Church envisions it according to law, I cannot fault the person. I’m not going to tell someone who has decided to give up ice cream and television for Lent that they must plop themselves down in front of the tube with a bowl of Haagen-Dazs.

Are Sundays part of Lent? This question often arises because of the custom (mentioned in Part I) of many people giving themselves a break from penance on Sundays in Lent.

The answer is yes, Sundays are part of Lent. Here is the definition of Lent from the General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar:

Lent runs from Ash Wednesday until the Mass of the Lord’s Supper exclusive [no. 28].

There’s nothing in that about Sundays not counting, so Sundays are indeed part of Lent.

A correspondent writes:

Ok i am doing the 40 day’s of Lent. And i was jus wondering if on Sunday you had to follow your lenten schedule?? Thanks.

Since giving up something for Lent (or doing extra penitential practices beyond abstinence on Fridays and fast and abstinence on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday) is voluntary, you can decide for yourself whether you want to do something on Sundays. Many people do not do any penances on Sunday as a way of celebrating Our Lord’s Resurrection.

Hope this helps!

How many days are there in Lent? Let’s count!

Every year this question comes up. People hear about Lent being forty days long, but when they look at a calendar this clearly isn’t the case. Since we’ve just quoted the official definition of the start and stop of Lent, let’s look at a calendar and count up the days. Here is the whole of Lent for 2004:

FEBRUARY
22	23	24	25 Ash Wed. 1	26 2	27 3	28 4
29 1st Sun. 5
MARCH
	1 6	2 7	3 8	4 9	5 10	6 11
7 2nd Sun. 12	8 13	9 14	10 15	11 16	12 17	13 18
14 3rd Sun. 19	15 20	16 21	17 22	18 23	19 24	20 25
21 4th Sun. 26	22 27	23 28	24 29	25 30	26 31	27 32
28 5th Sun. 33	29 34	30 35	31 36
APRIL
				1 37	2 38	3 39
4 Palm Sun. 40	5 41	6 42	7 43	8 Holy Thur. 44	9 Good Fri.	10 Holy Sat.
11 Easter Sun.	12	13	14	15	16	17

In this calendar, the days of Lent are counted in red. As you can see, there are forty four of them, counting Holy Thursday as one of the days (technically, only the part of Holy Thursday before the beginning of the Mass of the Lord’s Supper is Lent; once the Mass of the Lord’s Supper begins the season becomes Triduum).

Now a couple of notes:

• The fact that the calendar above is for 2004 does not matter. Neither does the fact that a Leap Year intervenes between Ash Wednesday and Holy Thursday. The reason is that Ash Wednesday is always a fixed number of Sundays before Holy Thursday (six Sundays, counting Palm Sunday). The particular dates of the calendar that the days of Lent fall on (Leap Year included) don’t affect the total number.
• If you want to be persnickety, you could argue that there are only forty three days since the definition of Lent’s start and stop points reads: "Lent runs from Ash Wednesday until the Mass of the Lord’s Supper exclusive [General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar 28]. Taking the word "exclusive" to refer to both Ash Wednesday and the Mass of the Lord’s Supper would knock a day off the total. However, doing this would be an error. Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent. Everybody knows this. And the General Norms immediately go on to list Ash Wednesday under the heading of Lent (see no. 29). The word "exclusive" applies only to the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. What we have is simply an imperfection in the drafting of the law such that it fails to properly express the legislator’s intent (which is to include Ash Wednesday in Lent).

So there you have it. Lent under current law is more than forty days long. The number forty is thus to be taken as approximate, not literal. If you want to read more about how Lent and its "forty days" evolved, see here.

(One last note: Some have noted that there are forty days up to and including Palm Sunday. Whether that is the reason Lent is said to have forty days is ambiguous; the article linked gives a much more complicated history. In any event, since the days after Palm Sunday are now part of Lent, the season now has more than forty days regardless of how the number originated).

The reader who asked about the liturgical day writes:

Very good, Thanks Jimmy. What happens with daylight savings time, is it ever addressed? Just curious. Thanx for being an ultra cool guy.

The Code of Canon Law does not address daylight savings time, but the answer is not in doubt. The legislator (that is to say, the pope) has not created a legally-binding "ecclesiastical clock" different from local, civil timekeeping. As a result, "ecclesiastical midnight" (to coin a term) is the same as "civil midnight" (to coin another term), the latter being whatever midnight is considered to be according to local civil law. The legislator is not concerned about daylight savings time or occasional twenty-three or twenty-five hour days as we shift into or out of daylight savings time.

Hypothetically, I can imagine legal situations where such considerations would become relevant under canon law (e.g., if there was a dispute about whether a particular person had the exercise of a right or office until a certain day and that day happened to be longer or shorter due to the shift into or out of daylight savings time). However, thus far the legislator has not been concerned to address these situations. As far as things like fast and abstinence, which is where the day division affects most people, he is content to allow local civil midnight to be the local church’s midnight, too.

As far as being cool, that’s not me. That’s just the air conditioning.

People seem to be having a lot of questions right now about time and the calendar. A reader writes:

I’ve had frog legs before. Those are pretty good. Tastes like chicken. Days of abstinence last from 12am-12am, right. I’ve always assumed that, but i guess i’m still not completely sure, cuz Sundays start at sundown the previous day, right.

According to the Code of Canon Law:

In law, a day is understood as a period consisting of 24 continuous hours and begins at midnight unless other provision is expressly made; a week is a period of 7 days; a month is a period of 30 days, and a year is a period of 365 days unless a month and a year are said to be taken as they are in the calendar (Can. 202 §1).

So you’re right that days are reckoned from midnight to midnight (I’ll set aside the technical issue of whether the day begins at 12:00:00 or 12:00:01 or 12:01:00 or 12:01:01). However, it isn’t quite correct to say that Sunday begins at sundown on Saturday. According to the General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar:

The liturgical day runs from midnight to midnight, but the observance of Sunday and solemnities begins with the evening of the preceding day (Ia:3).

Sunday, considered as a legal day (per the Code) or as a liturgical day (per the General Norms) is still midnight to midnight, but its "observance" begins late in the day on Saturday. What precisely counts as "observance" seems to be unclear, though it has special prayers in the Liturgy of the Hours and it is possible to fulfill the obligation to attend Mass during the period of "observance."

That period, which begins "with the evening," also is not precisely defined in the current law. Evening isn’t sundown (which varies depending on the time of year and what latitude you are at–in Alaska Saturday may not even have a sundown!), but the law doesn’t say just when it begins. In the absence of that, the matter is somewhat debatable. The commentary on the Code of Canon Law put out by the Canon Law Society of Great Britain and Ireland takes the position that without further specification, evening begins at noon (and, indeed, people often do speak of the afternoon as evening, at least in some places). The new commentary by the Canon Law Society of America takes a different position. It would be nice if Rome gave us further guidance on this, and they may well do so as part of the liturgical renewal begun in the last few years.

Incidentally, what applies to Sunday in this regard also applies to all solemnities (which include the other holy days of obligation, plus a few more).