I continue to mourn the fragmentation of the Christian year, as Corpus Christi is celebrated on different days even within the same country. On Thursday Pope Francis described the Most Holy Eucharist as the centre and pattern of Church life, yet this affirmation was powerfully contradicted by the fact that many other Catholics weren’t to celebrate the institution of the Blessed Sacrament for another three days.
When the Thursday after Trinity Sunday came I thought of the words of Blessed John Henry Newman, who said of Catholic tradition that it is not that these things are themselves divine, but long use has made them so. Then I remembered that it made sense to have Corpus Christi on a Thursday in the same way it makes sense to have Good Friday on a Friday, since it was the day on which Our Lord initiated the mystery. And then I backtracked to the case of the Ascension: the idea of celebrating the Ascension 40 days after the Resurrection is, in fact, of divine origin.
There is a reason why in the Creed we profess belief in Jesus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. It is because the reference to historical context reminds us that this is real. It is not a conceptualisation of the Church – not a symbol, but a fact. In order for something to be real we require it to have a defined relationship to history, not an arbitrary or fictional one.
There is a reason we commemorate the day of someone’s birth or death rather than picking a nearby day at random to celebrate the fact of their existence or demise. A particular day or date is part of the reasonableness of asserting the existence of the particular, the real, and aligning ourselves with it. “Historical reality” means that because we can locate something or someone within the context of their impact on experience other than our own, we can be certain that they are not conceptual, and that they help us to transcend our experience.
Thus we used to locate Ascension Day 40 days after Easter and Corpus Christi on a Thursday by a truth found in Scripture and a tradition of centuries. Perhaps the historicity and reasonableness of faith are brought into question by tinkering with the Christian calendar and making it self-referential. To celebrate the Ascension on the nearest Sunday to when it used to be celebrated is not the same thing as celebrating Ascension Day.
Imagine for a moment that the Christian calendar is a map by which we navigate our lifelong journey towards the Lord. Feast days are like those little marker pins dropped in on Google Maps. Feast days pinpoint significant stages, the resting places or places of significant interest to pause because of some feature of the place. They govern our approach to the journey and the extent to which we are to maximise the beauty of the route and pace ourselves sensibly. We could expect that at these stops we will meet other fellow-travellers.
By removing the holidays of obligation from their historical days, our pastors have, in effect, looked at the old map and decreed that the pins will fall every X miles, regardless of the topography or terrain or reasons for a particular stop. The route and destination may remain exactly the same but the journey has lost much of its joy and particular motivation now that the stops are chosen for convenience, rather than for a significance derived from the origins of the journey, the intersection with fellow-travellers.
Gone is the discovery of oneself as just the latest in a long line of people who have passed the same way, thereby shaping these resting places and changing the surrounding culture and terrain. The features of the route no longer dictate our pausing to rest, reflect and admire the view. A utilitarian spirit hurries us on to the nearest Sunday, where we are told that it will be much more satisfactory to interiorise the view presented to us a few days ago because we will be less rushed.
As fewer and fewer people stop at the time-honoured staging posts, these will become slowly derelict and abandoned and no longer noticed by the people who live in that country. However you look at it, a particular day may commemorate a particular event; but the nearest Sunday to that particular day is merely a statistical convenience.
Pastor Iuventus is a Catholic priest in London
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