Introduction

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The liturgical year - with its Sundays and weekdays, Easter and Christmas, Advent and Lent, ferias and feasts - is one of the great givens of the Christian life . We live our lives within it . This is true even when we are not consciously averting to it . It’s a framework, a mould, a supporting rhythm, a background that at some peak times becomes the foreground . It has, too, been one of the great facts of European and Western cultural history . We’re familiar with the civil year (which comes to us from the Romans), the financial year, the academic year… But there is this other presence too - still hanging on even in semi-pagan Britain - and every revolutionary attempt to conjure it away (1789, 1917) has itself foundered .

In the Roman rite now, we have a liturgical year both luminously intent on the essentials and rich in its details . “By means of the yearly cycle”, says the Calendarium Romanum of 1969, echoing Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium, “the Church celebrates the whole mystery of Christ, from his Incarnation until the day of Pentecost and the expectation of his coming again .” Central is the Easter Triduum - from the evening Mass of Maundy Thursday to the Compline of Easter Sunday . Out of this flows the Easter season, with its fifty days culminating

4 in Pentecost, and towards it flows the critical season of Lent . Such is the “Easter cycle” .

Second to it in stature is the “Christmas cycle”, with its similar pattern of a season of celebration, running to the feast of the Lord’s Baptism, and a season of preparation, much-cherished Advent . There is the fine Byzantine phrase for all this: “the winter Pasch” .