Moving Immovable Feasts
The Church's Duty to Celebrate
On this day back in 1582, the papal bull Inter Gravissimas was promulgated, thus setting out Pope Gregory XIII’s famous calendar reform. The details of the bull are quite interesting (like how the annual dating of Easter served as a motive force for the reform or how the review process for the new calendar’s method was accomplished). One detail I want to focus on is the directive that 10 days (October 5th through October 14th) were to be taken out for the year 1582.
This removal of 10 days raises some issues. What are you to do if your monthly payment to your landlord falls on October 10th? Are you off the hook for that month? Well, the bull specifies that due dates for payments are to be extended to make up for the ten days. So that’s that. Surely, there wouldn’t be any other matters to be settled.
Not so fast! Even before the bull handles due dates for monetary payments, there are some other due dates that need to be dealt with: the dates due for celebrating the feasts of the saints. In a section three times as long as the section on payment dates, the bull lays out quite carefully how the specific feast days are to be paid their due.
Take as an example the pope and martyr Saint Callixtus. His feast was, and still is, celebrated on October 14th. Since October 14th was to be excluded from the calendar for 1582, when would his feast be celebrated? Well, the bull moves the celebration to October 16th for this situation. Similarly with other feasts that were affected by the removal of the 10 days.
Yet this solution begs the question, “Should any affected feasts be kept or should they just be skipped that year?” Obviously, they were deemed to be important enough to keep, even at the cost of having to shift them around to appropriate dates.
So why was keeping them so important? Fr. Thomas Nicholas Burke, a great Dominican preacher of modern times, sheds some light on the matter. Preaching on his own national patron, Saint Patrick, the Dominican friar notes, “One of the great duties of God’s Church, to which she has ever been most faithful, is the celebration of her saints.” (The text is from Fr. Thomas’s Lectures and Sermons, New York: P. M. Haverty, 1872, p. 9.)
The keeping of the feasts, the celebration of the saints, is nothing less than a duty for God’s holy church. Still, why is this duty so important? Like the Dominican he is, the friar preacher is quick to anticipate the objection and thus he makes a distinction.
The saints were the living and most faithful representatives of Christ our Lord, of his virtues, his love, his actions, his power, so that He lived in them, and wrought in them, and through them, the redemption of men; therefore the Church honors, not so much the saint, as Christ our Lord in the saint.
The keeping of the feasts isn’t merely a celebration of a person who did good things. The festal celebrations of the church are days owed to the Lord, days of celebrating the Christ who saved his people. This Christ didn’t save in the abstract; he saved real, concrete individuals. He saved Saint Callixtus, and that’s something worth celebrating.