Ordinary Time

Ordinary Time, in Latin Tempus per Annum ("time through the year"), is the longest stretch of the Catholic liturgical year. It encompasses the weeks of the year outside the festal seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. In a typical year Ordinary Time runs to approximately thirty-three or thirty-four weeks, divided into two unequal stretches with the Lent-Easter cycle interposing between them.¹

The name and the misunderstanding

The name "Ordinary Time" is sometimes misunderstood, in English, as suggesting that the season is unimportant or "ordinary" in the colloquial sense of plain or unremarkable. This is a translation artifact. The Latin Tempus per Annum simply means "time through the year." The word ordinalis in de Tempore Ordinario refers to the ordinal numbering of the Sundays (First, Second, Third, and so on), not to a contrast with extraordinary or important.²

The proper understanding of Ordinary Time is that it is the time of the Church's ordinary, sustained meditation on the public ministry of Christ. The festal seasons commemorate the great events of salvation history: the Incarnation (Christmas), the Passion and Resurrection (Lent and Easter), the descent of the Spirit (Pentecost). Between and after these festal celebrations, the Church takes up the public teaching, miracles, parables, and saying of Jesus, in the Sunday Gospel readings; this is the work of Ordinary Time.

The structure of Ordinary Time

The current Roman Calendar divides Ordinary Time into two stretches:

• The first stretch runs from the day after the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord (the Sunday after Epiphany) through the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. Depending on the date of Easter, this can be as short as four weeks or as long as eight or nine weeks.
• The second stretch runs from Pentecost Monday through the Saturday before the First Sunday of Advent. This is the long stretch, typically around twenty-four weeks.

The Sundays are numbered consecutively across both stretches: when the first stretch ends with the Eighth Sunday (for example) before Lent intervenes, the second stretch resumes with the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost. The numbering ensures that the lectionary cycle, which spans the Sundays of Ordinary Time, is preserved across the interruption of Lent and Easter.

The Sunday lectionary

The Sunday Mass readings of Ordinary Time follow a three-year cycle:

• Year A: the Gospel of Saint Matthew is read at the Gospel proclamation across the Sundays of Ordinary Time.
• Year B: the Gospel of Saint Mark, supplemented by the Bread of Life Discourse from John 6 (across five summer Sundays).
• Year C: the Gospel of Saint Luke.

The Gospel of Saint John is reserved for proclamation in the festal seasons (Christmas, Lent, Easter) and is not assigned an Ordinary Time year of its own; this is because John's account, with its high theological density, is judged better suited to the festal seasons.³

The liturgical character of Ordinary Time

The liturgical color of Ordinary Time is green, signifying the constancy and growth of the life of the Church. The Mass is celebrated with the Gloria on Sundays and on solemnities and feasts, and without the Gloria on weekdays of Ordinary Time. The Alleluia is sung throughout the season (it is suppressed only in Lent). Vestments are green at Sunday and weekday Masses.

Several solemnities and feasts of the universal calendar fall within Ordinary Time and provide festal accents within the longer stretches. Among the most prominent in the Latin Church:

• The Most Holy Trinity (the Sunday after Pentecost): a solemnity celebrating the central mystery of the Catholic faith.
• The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ ("Corpus Christi," the Sunday after Trinity Sunday): a solemnity in honor of the Eucharist.
• The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus (the Friday after Corpus Christi): a solemnity commemorating Christ's love for humanity. Often paired with a novena to the Sacred Heart.
• The Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul (June 29).
• The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (August 15).
• The Solemnity of All Saints (November 1).
• The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed ("All Souls Day," November 2).
• The Solemnity of Christ the King, the last Sunday of Ordinary Time before Advent: closes both Ordinary Time and the entire liturgical year.

The Solemnity of Christ the King

The final Sunday of Ordinary Time, immediately preceding the First Sunday of Advent, is the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. The feast was instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925 in the encyclical Quas Primas, in response to what the pope identified as the rising secularism of the modern age. The placement of the feast as the climax of the liturgical year carries explicit theological intent: the entire arc of the Church's year, from the Incarnation through the Resurrection through the descent of the Spirit and the long sustained teaching of the public ministry, terminates in the universal Kingship of Christ over all things.⁴

The day after the Solemnity of Christ the King, the new liturgical year begins with the First Sunday of Advent.

Ordinary Time in the lay Catholic life

The longer stretches of Ordinary Time are the proper time for the deepening of habits of Catholic life: a regular cycle of confession, Sunday Mass, daily prayer, the rosary, the reading of Scripture, the works of mercy, and the practice of catechetical study. The festal seasons, with their high concentration of liturgical celebration, would burn out the believer if they continued unrelieved; Ordinary Time, with its sustained green of growth, is the period in which the festal seeds are slowly cultivated into the ordinary practice of holiness.

For the festal seasons that interrupt and frame Ordinary Time, see Advent, Christmas, Lent, the Sacred Triduum, and Easter.

Sources

Footnotes

1. General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, nn. 43-44. ↩

2. General Norms, n. 43, distinguishing the de Tempore Ordinario from a translation suggesting unimportance. ↩

3. Lectionary for Mass, Introduction, on the use of the Synoptic Gospels in the three-year Sunday cycle of Ordinary Time and the reservation of John for festal seasons. ↩

4. Pius XI, Quas Primas (1925), instituting the Feast of Christ the King. Pope Saint Paul VI moved the feast to the last Sunday of the liturgical year in the 1969 calendar reform. ↩