Liturgical Year – Page 42

The Length of Lent

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).

Local Time

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.

The Liturgical Day

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).

The Law of Abstinence

The Fridays of Lent are days of abstinence in the Latin rite of the Catholic Church, and so every Lent gives rise to questions about what the law of abstinence involves. The Code of Canon Law establishes that "those who have completed their fourteenth year of age" (i.e., those who have passed their fourteenth birthday) are obliged to abstain (CIC 1251), but the Code does not give an explanation of abstinence itself. This explanation is found instead in a 1966 apostolic constitution from Paul VI called Paenitemini (in case you’re wondering, that’s pronounced PEN-ih-TEM-ih-nee in English). Here is an English translation of the relevant norm:

The law of abstinence forbids the use of meat, but not of eggs, the products of milk or condiments made of animal fat [III:1].

The trouble is that this explanation–at least in its English translation–is not as clear as one would like. It does not, for example, mention the exception of fish and other seafood from the law of abstinence, and this is universally acknowledged as an exception. The reason the exception is not mentioned is that it is implicit in the original Latin of the text, which reads:

Abstinentiae lex vetat carne vesei, non autem ovis, lacticiniis et quibuslibet condimentis etiam ex adipe animalium [III:1].

The word for "meat" in the original is carnis (here inflected in the ablative as carne), which does not correspond exactly in meaning to the English word "meat." In contemporary English, "meat" tends to mean the flesh of any animal, whether it is a mammal, a bird, a fish, or what have you. But as used here, carnis refers only to the flesh of mammals and birds. It does not include the flesh of fish (or, for that matter, of reptiles, amphibians, or insects).

Another possible exception to the rule may be found by comparing the norm in Paenitemini to the original regulation in the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which held:

The law of abstinence prohibits meat and soups made from meat but not of eggs, milks, and also whatever condiments are derived from animal fat [CIC(1917) 1250].

Since the 1917 law included an exclusion of soups using meat but the 1966 norm does not, in the common opinion of canonists today appears to be that soups using meat no longer violate the law of abstinence. (A few Lents ago, I did an extensive check on this.) Notice that the rest of the sequence (meat, eggs, milk products, condiments) is entirely undisturbed, suggesting that soup was intentionally dropped.

Personally, I’m intrigued by the fact that amphibian flesh is not excluded. If I knew where to get frogs legs here in Southern California, I’d go out and order them. I haven’t had frogs legs since I was a boy, when I’d go frog gigging in the piney woods of East Texas with the menfolk of my family on warm summer nights.