The prefect of the Vatican’s worship office said this week that when days holy days of obligation are transferred on the Church’s liturgical calendar because of conflict with another feast day, the ensuing obligation to go to Mass does not transfer to the new date.
The announcement would seem to override a 2024 Vatican letter that created a fracas over an obligation to attend Mass when the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception was moved to a Monday because of its conflict with an Advent Sunday.
“The coexistence, in the liturgical year, of the weekly cycle of movable feasts and weekdays and of days with fixed date celebrations, both in the the universal and particular calendars, gives rise to the phenomenon of occurrentia festorum, ie., the coincidence of two feast days on the same calendar date,” wrote Cardinal Arthur Roche, prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, in a Jan. 23 notification.
Roche explained that when feasts coincide, the “one that holds the highest rank according to the Table of Liturgical Days is observed,” with a lesser solemnity moved to the next available day.
But while the Vatican said otherwise late last year, Roche said that moving a feast would not make the new date of its observation a day of canonical precept.
“In the event of the occasional transfer of a holyday of obligation, the obligation to attend Mass is not transferred to the [new] day,” he wrote.
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The cardinal’s note came after a legal clarification from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Legislative Texts last September.
In a letter to Bishop Thomas Paprocki, chair of the USCCB’s canonical affairs committee, the dicastery explained that…
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