New Book Offers Timely Guide to Liturgical Times and Days
Jan 27, 2025

New Book Offers Timely Guide to Liturgical Times and Days

The 2024 kerfuffle over whether the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception (transferred from December 8 to December 9 because the Second Sunday of Advent preempted it) remained a holyday of obligation brought the average Catholic into contact with something of the nuances of how the Catholic liturgical calendar works. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) had held that the transfer of the feast did not also involve transfer of the obligation to observe it as a feast of precept. Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, IL, chose to check with the Vatican, which made clear in a letter finally published in October that the USCCB position was wrong. Bishops then scrambled whether to grant a one-time dispensation from the obligation, resulting in another instance of “holydays-by-geography,” a phenomenon already plaguing how Catholics in the United States observe the Solemnity of the Ascension.

All that means Father Paul Turner’s latest book, Sacred Times: A Guide to the General Roman Calendar and the Table of Liturgical Days is both very timely and very useful. I don’t know when the book went to press, but Turner correctly notes, “When December 8 falls on a Sunday, the observance transfers to Monday, December 9, and the obligation to participate at Mass transfers with it” (Sacred Times, 229 (emphasis added)). The author then adds a bit of history: when the General Roman Calendar was being revised in the late 1960s, its designers originally planned to move Immaculate Conception back one day, to December 7, when it fell on a Sunday. In 1974, that’s what happened, but with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith allowing individual episcopal conferences to ask to preempt the Second Sunday of Advent. However, as Turner notes, the Calendar presupposed the privileged status of the Sundays of Advent as steppingstones to Christmas, so we have the system we do.

Paul Turner, Sacred Times: A Guide to the General Roman Calendar and the Table of Liturgical Days by Paul Turner. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2024. 266 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8146-8902-8. $26.95 Paperback. $24.99 e-book.

Chapters and Days

Turner’s book is divided into six chapters of unequal length. The first chapter, “The General Roman Calendar,” is a guide to the principles and vision that informed the Calendar as it was promulgated in 1969 as well as introduction to key terms, like “proper,” “commons,” etc. Chapter two, “Revising the Proper of Time,” discusses how the “Paschal Mystery [is] at the center” of the Calendar and, therefore, the center of the Sunday liturgy. By “liturgy” Turner refers not just to Sunday Mass but also the Liturgy of the Hours for that day. Ancillary topics include the status of “Saturday evening Mass;” what happens when consecutive solemnities occur; the question of a fixed or moveable Easter (potentially a point of discussion in 2025 when Catholic and Orthodox Easter coincides and both mark the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which first wrestled with the Easter question); and what happened to Ember and Rogation Days.

Chapter three, “Revising the Proper of Saints,” provides detailed comments on how solemnities, feasts, memorials, optional memorials, and commemorations interact with the changeable parts of the Mass and Liturgy of the Hours. Also included in that discussion is when Masses for the dead and various votive Masses can and cannot be celebrated. Chapter four, “The Proper of Time” (Turner is explicit that the reformers chose to speak not of “liturgical seasons”— which he thinks more characteristic of the recurrent cyclical natural year—but of “liturgical times”), discusses Advent, Christmas Time, Lent, the Paschal Triduum, Easter Time, and Ordinary Time, noting particular liturgical characteristics of each.

Chapter five, “The Proper of Saints,” is by far the longest chapter, with a month-by-month, feast-by-feast (in the generic sense of that term) account of what is celebrated on particular days in the Roman Calendar, the history behind how things came to be as they are, and the larger liturgical implications of that feast (e.g., When does a saint only get a mention in the Opening Prayer of Mass?). The chapter is not limited to the General Roman Calendar but also mentions variations in the U.S. National Calendar, e.g., St. Kateri Tekakwitha being observed in the United States on July 14 but in Canada on April 17, or how Bl. Michael McGivney is an optional memorial in the Archdiocese of Hartford but “each bishop may permit groups of Knights [of Columbus] to venerate Michael” on August 13 (Sacred Times, 187). The Chapter also takes note of non-liturgical events—days and times of prayer and reflection—that, nevertheless, the Church marks either globally (e.g., “Sunday of the Word of God” on the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time) or nationally (e.g., “National Marriage Week” in early February).

Chapter six, “The Table of Liturgical Days,” sums up how the individual elements of the Calendar interact with the liturgy. Two appendices give an alphabetical listing “of days in the Proper of Time” and a rubrical table that govern the when’s for celebration of ritual, votive, and Masses for the dead.

A History of Sacred Time

A treasure trove of liturgical detail, the book builds on many of its predecessors precisely by its historical element. We have many quality books on the reform of the liturgical calendar (e.g., Martimort et al.’s Church at Prayer, vol. 4, on The Liturgy and Time, and Adolf Adam’s The Liturgical Year), but we still lack comprehensive histories of what went on at the Council and in the commissions supposedly implementing its reforms. Annibale Bugnini’s Reform of the Liturgy does tell something of that story but from a partisan’s perspective.

Turner significantly salts his work with historical background, though writing a history per se is not his goal. An example: Turner notes that the revision of the Calendar was “greatly helped by work conducted from 1948 to 1960 by the Pian Commission, established and named for Pope Pius XII” (Sacred Times, 4). Period. We’re not told much specifically about what the revisers mined from the Commission though, presumably, it did considerable work in conjunction with that Pope’s 1950s liturgical reforms, particularly of Holy Week. More often, the history is generic, e.g., the revisers wanted to make St. Alphonsus Ligouri optional, allowing then for additional optional observances on August 1, but the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Pope St. Paul VI both wanted Alphonsus retained, which made him obligatory, pushed Eusebius of Vercelli to the next day, and made the “Maccabee Brothers” disappear. Turner also adds post-revision historical developments, e.g., the revisers never added Our Lady of Fatima to the calendar but Pope St. John Paul II—attributing his being saved from assassination on that day in 1981—did.

Overall, this is an impressive book that merits space on the shelves of priests, liturgists, and liturgical planners. It certainly has a place in seminary teaching.

Quibbles and Cautions

That’s not to say I might not have some quibbles with the book. Some may be matters of perspective: there are “reforms” of the Calendar I think misguided but of which Turner almost always reliably approves. I think, for example, that the failure to classify Advent as a penitential season (despite both the earlier tradition and the ongoing use of violet vestments) deemphasizes the seriousness of sin and is both a pastoral and liturgical failing. Turner seems to approve that “the revisers wanted Advent to exude more joy than repentance” (Sacred Times, 56). Turner seems to think the elimination of Ember Days makes sense. I think that, together with the “do-it-yourself” approach to penance on non-Lenten Fridays which the bishops of the United States adopted in 1966, the explicitly penitential motifs in the liturgical year hardly correspond to the comprehensive need for repentance in our (and every) time. In general, I’d say Turner is sympathetic to what I would call the more “astringent” character of the calendar reform, whereas I think it’s a fault.

Perhaps some of my quibbles are stylistic. Conceding that successive drafts of the Calendar left St. Anthony Zaccaria on July 5, Turner notes “the revisers first considered him of little importance” (Sacred Times, 171). Likewise, St. Norbert stayed in the calendar even though “revisers first categorized him among founders of orders of little importance” (Sacred Times, 162). Acknowledging the possibilities of sanctity are infinite but calendar space finite and without bearing a torch either for Zaccaria or the Norbertines, I nevertheless found dismissal of a saint or a religious order as of “little importance” off-putting. Likewise, the tendency to identify John Paul’s nationality with actions involving Polish saints (e.g., “the Polish-born Pope John Paul II changed the status of [St. Stanislaus] from optional to obligatory” [Sacred Times, 147] or St. Maximilian Kolbe’s “countryman Pope John Paul canonized him in 1982 and added him to the general calendar the following year as an obligatory memorial” [Sacred Times, 187]) seems somewhat to undercut those figures. Nobody writes, “The Italian Pope X canonized Ss. Philip Neri or Maria Goretti.” Perhaps a bit of a double standard exists in this inconsistent treatment of which pope canonized which saints.

My only other caution is not aimed directly at the book. I have criticized the recent ascendency of canon law over good theology in liturgy: e.g., the primary justification for the some-Saturday-and-Monday-holydays-get-out-of-church-free rule in the United States (as if the faithful could not tolerate going to Mass two days in a row!) stands more on canonical authority than good theology. Similarly, one should keep an eye peeled against an overly dominant rubricism without, however, denying the importance of rubrical observance to good liturgy. That said, Turner does not lose sight of the liturgical forest for the rubrical trees. For instance, he notes where celebrants or at least local ordinaries have discretion to choose, e.g., an anticipated Mass for a solemnity over the “proper” Evening Prayer II for that date.

This book is an extremely useful, well written, timely, and highly serviceable book for persons involved with or interested in the liturgy and how the revised General Roman Calendar interacts with it. While these operations are usually quiet and hidden from view, the 2024 case of the Immaculate Conception makes clear somebody needs to know how things work. Turner explains it. Recommended.

John Grondelski

John Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) was former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ.