Ordinary Time comprises a total of 33 or 34 weeks, some of which (5 to 9) fall after the feast of the Baptism of Jesus, which closes the Christmas season and opens the first part of Ordinary Time, and the other Sundays after the solemnity of Pentecost (second part).
Ordinary Time does not always include complete weeks: some of them are missing Sundays, as these are replaced by a feast of the Lord. Thus, the first Sunday coincides with the Baptism of the Lord; on Sundays, the solemnities of the Trinity, the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (where not celebrated on Thursday) and Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, are celebrated.
The week before Lent belongs to Ordinary Time only for the first three days: Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.
Adrien Nocent O.S.B. states: ‘What we today call Ordinary Time, because it does not have as its object the celebration of a particular mystery of Christ, has nothing in itself that makes it inferior to other times or, on the contrary, has a superior value’ ([1] ). If the other seasons are often called ‘strong seasons’, Ordinary Time cannot be called or considered a ‘weak season’. On the contrary, history shows that the ordinary week originated in the Church even before the annual celebration of Easter, and therefore before the ‘strong seasons’.
Ordinary time celebrates the mystery of Christ and of the Church in its entirety, every week and especially every Sunday. The structure of ordinary time has varied greatly over the centuries, as have the titles of individual Sundays or weeks.
The number of ordinary weeks in the early centuries gradually decreased as the organisation of the liturgical year, i.e. the various liturgical seasons, developed. It is clear that if Lent went from two to three to five or six weeks, and if the preparation for Easter was extended first to Quinquagesima (around 530), then to Sexagesima (around 590/604) and Septuagesima (around 650), and if finally the season of Advent is extended to 4 0 5 weeks, the time remaining as ordinary time is reduced.
To determine the number of these ordinary Sundays, we started from a few fixed points. For example, the Sundays of Advent were named by counting backwards from Christmas: we had the fourth (or sixth) Sunday before Christmas, down to the first Sunday. For ordinary Sundays before the preparation for Easter, the Sundays were counted starting (post) from Epiphany. This way of proceeding avoids fixing the number: there will thus be several Sundays after Epiphany, depending on the time between Epiphany and Septuagesima.
For Sundays between Pentecost and Advent, there are different ways of naming them. The Gregorian sacramentary (the sacramentary is similar to a Roman Missal of the Second Vatican Council) (also known as the Paduan)[2] , as well as Alcuin’s Comes (Lectionary)[3] :
5 Ebdomadae (= weeks) post Pentecosten;
5 Ebdomadae post octavas apostolorum;
5 Dominicae post matalem;
9 Dominicae post s. Angeli.
At present, it has not yet been possible to find all the non-Roman sources of Western liturgy that would enable us to know with certainty the exact number of ordinary Sundays in the period we are interested in in our study[4] . Finally, it should be noted that the number of Sundays may vary each year, and therefore one manuscript may give the minimum number and another the maximum possible number of Sundays.
The Missal of Pius V distinguishes ordinary Sundays as Post Epiphaniam (from 3 to 6 Sundays) and Post Pentecost (24 Sundays, with the possibility of repeating, if necessary, before the 24th, the formulas for the Sundays after Epiphany that were omitted).
The new Roman Calendar[5] numbers these weeks consecutively, from I to XXIV, calling them Ordinary Time.
The fact that no liturgical book prior to Vatican II contains texts for celebrations on weekdays means that on these days the Church did not have celebrations that were of interest to the community.
This is in theory. In practice, although in different ways depending on the various periods and regions, celebrations on weekdays, or on some of them, did take place (and are attested).
The first extra-Sunday days to have celebrations were the dies natales of the martyrs (= the date of their martyrdom) and of the saints (= the date of their death).
Celebrations were then held on the days following major feasts, primarily the days following Easter week (= Easter octave) and those preceding it, for example Lent (although not all days in Lent were celebrated at the beginning). During ordinary time, Wednesdays and Fridays of fasting at the beginning of the seasons (= the Four Ember Days) were celebrated. Outside Egypt and perhaps also outside Rome, the fasts of other Wednesdays and Fridays also ended with the celebration of the Eucharist. This is attested to us from the 4th century[6] . The week of the Tempora ended with a celebration on the night between Saturday and Sunday, which counted as Sunday Eucharist, hence the indication: Dominica vacat (= without its own formula). However, from around the 7th century onwards, these Sundays were also given a formula (while retaining the title vacat). The celebration of the Tempora vigil was then brought forward to Saturday, which also had its own Mass, like Wednesday and Friday.
If there was no public celebration on other days, there was, in some places, a private celebration, i.e. in small groups.[7] In Africa, daily celebration, open to all the faithful, is attested by St Augustine.[8]
In the Middle Ages, with the proliferation of votive Masses, daily Masses became more frequent and were celebrated in public churches, and even more than one in the same church, and then more than one at the same time.
The Second Vatican Council reform presents a dual approach: it does not provide specific formulas for weekdays in ordinary time. However, it does provide a weekday Lectionary, and therefore accepts and utilises the fact, already established by the Code of Canon Law, which urges priests to celebrate every day.
In the first part of Mass, there has always been the Liturgy of the Word. According to Justin in his Two Apologies, 150 AD, the Bible was read continuously (lectio continua, or scriptura currens), in the sense that the text was taken up where it had been left off in the previous celebration[9] .
From the third century onwards, there is evidence that on certain liturgical occasions, specific letters were already being used, and thus the lectio selecta had begun. However, it is likely that a lectio semicontinua was used on Sundays during Ordinary Time, meaning that some passages were occasionally omitted.
The book being read was initially the Bible, and the days on which the pericope was to be proclaimed were marked in the margins. Later, a separate booklet was drawn up in which the following was noted for each passage: the opening words (= incipit) and the title (= explicit). These books took the name of capitularia. The capitularia should be distinguished from the capitulare: books containing only references to the Gospels and those containing references to readings before the Gospel, known as comes, liber comitis or liber commicus (= support books) or[10] .
In the following centuries, lectionaries appeared with biblical passages reproduced in full.
With the appearance of the Missal, the lectionary disappeared as an autonomous liturgical book, but it was incorporated into the missal.
In fact, the Missal of Pius V contains a system of readings that dates back, for the epistles, to the Comes of Murbach (8th century) and, for the Gospels, to a type of Gospel book that forms the basis of the first three types of Klauser[11] . The pairing of epistles and gospels for each day is random, as is the order of the readings in the anni circuli.[12] There were certainly not many pericopes read at Mass, considering that, outside of Lent, only Sundays had their own formularies and readings.
Following the provisions of SC no. 51, the OLM, which emerged from the liturgical reform of Vatican II, distributes the reading of Sacred Scripture more widely in the liturgy. The group of specialists who prepared it discussed at length the criteria to be adopted for its compilation.
They came to the conclusion that the Sunday readings should be arranged in three cycles (A, B and C) and in a two-year cycle for weekdays: I (odd years) II (even years).
However, for special times, the readings are chosen specifically for each celebration, while for ordinary time, other criteria have been followed.
On Sundays, as on solemnities, there are three readings: the first from the Old Testament, the second from the letters of the Apostles, and the third from the Gospel. Starting with the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are read in the three cycles respectively. John, on the other hand, is reserved for part of Lent and Eastertide, but is also taken up again on Sundays XVII-XXI of cycle B.
Normally, the Gospel and the readings from the Apostles are read in a semi-continuous manner. Consequently, it is inappropriate to seek harmony between these two readings. The reading from the Old Testament, on the other hand, is chosen deliberately, based on the Gospel of the day, of which it is an illustration or an explanatory element.
By Fr. Giorgio Bontempi, C.M.
[1] A. Nocent, Celebrating Jesus Christ: The Liturgical Year. V. Ordinary Time, Assisi 1978, 16.
[2] J. DESHUSSES (ed.), Le Sacramentaire Gregorien, I (Spicilegium Friburgense, 16), Fribourg 1971, index. Cf. C. VOGHEL, Introduction aux sources du culte cretienne au moyen – age, Spoleto 1966, 279.
[3] A. WILMART, Le Lectionnaire d’Alcuin, EphLit, 51(1937), 158-161. In this lectionary, between the Sundays after St. Lawrence and those after the Angels, there are two Sundays with the title mensis septimi. We thus have four weeks post Pentecost, five post natale apostolorum, five post s. Larentii, two mensis septimi, six post s.Angeli: a total of 22 weeks.
[4] See VOGHEL- R. ELZE, Le Pontifical Romano-Germanique du XII° siecle, Introduction, II, Vatican City, 1963. 289 – 309.
[5] Calendarium Romanum ex decreto sacrosancti Oecumenici Concilii Vaticani IIinstauretum,auctoritatePauli VI promulgatum,Polyglottis Vaticanis 1969, nos. 43-44, pp. 16-17; cf. Commentarius in Annum liturgicum instauratum, ibid., pp. 62-63. In n
[6] Cf. J. A. JUNGMANN, Missarum sollemnia, I, Casale Monferrato, 1963, 206
[7] Ibid., p. 181, n. 4
[8] AGOSTINO, Ep., 54,2: PL 33, 363-364; Serm., 58, 4: PL 38, 395. Cf. J. A. JUNGMANN, Missarum sollemnia, cit., p. 207, n. 16
[9] St Justin, The Two Apologies, Edizione Paoline, Rome, 1983, p. 118, 3.
[10] See Anamesis, 2. La liturgia, panorama storico generale, Casale Monferrato, 1883, 157-171.
[11] TH KLAUSER, Das römische Capitulare Evangeliorum, I, Typen (LWQ), 28), Münster W. 1935.
[12] See VOGHEL, Introduction…, cit, 328.
