Ordinary Time (Tempus per annum) is, in the Church's calendar, the longest and most discreet of the liturgical seasons: the thirty-three or thirty-four weeks of the year that belong neither to the cycle of Advent and Christmas, nor to that of Lent and Easter[1]. Its colour is green, and its object, far from poor, is immense: in it is celebrated "no particular aspect of the mystery of Christ, but the mystery of Christ itself in its fullness"[2].
Its name lends itself to a persistent misunderstanding. Ordinary does not mean "banal", "unimportant" or "empty": it comes from the idea of order and number. The weeks are numbered — first week, second, … up to the thirty-fourth — just as we speak of an ordinal number[3]. Ordinary Time is therefore not a "dead season" between two feasts: it is the season in which the Church, week after week and above all each Sunday, traverses the whole life and teaching of Christ.
This article sets out what Ordinary Time is (its name, its object, the green that is neither penance nor radiant feast), when it begins and ends (its two blocks and the strange numbering of its weeks), how it is read (the three-year cycle of the Gospels), which great feasts punctuate it (Trinity, Corpus Christi, Sacred Heart, Christ the King), where it comes from (the 1969 reform and what came before), and finally how to live it. The overview of the whole cycle is given in the article The Liturgical Year; the detail of Sunday in Sunday and that of the saints in The Calendar of Saints.
What is Ordinary Time?
Before describing its dates and readings, the ambiguity carried by its name must be cleared up. Many of the faithful hear "Ordinary Time" as one would hear "nothing special": a long green stretch, without major feasts, between the summits of Christmas and Easter. That is a false reading, which the liturgy itself refutes.
"Ordinary" does not mean "banal"
The English ordinary has, in everyday use, a negative colouring: the ordinary is the common, the everyday without relief. But the liturgical word does not have that meaning. It conveys the idea that the weeks of this season are counted, ordered by a number. We speak of the "Third Week in Ordinary Time" as we speak of an ordinal number (first, second, third) as opposed to a cardinal number (one, two, three)[4]. The liturgist Michael P. Foley recalls that the word points to the order of the numbered weeks, not to their supposed banality, and that it should be heard a little like the ordinary of the Mass — the fixed part, the stable framework — rather than as "the humdrum"[5].
The misunderstanding is so widespread that Catholic authors have regretted the expression, judged clumsy in French as in English: nothing, in the Christian life, is "ordinary" in the flat sense[6]. But criticism of the word must not make us forget the richness of the thing: this season has its own positive object, and it is the vastest of the year.
Tempus per annum: "the season through the year"
The official name, in Latin, is not tempus ordinarium but Tempus per annum — literally "the season through the year", "along the course of the year"[7]. It is the French expression Temps Ordinaire, proposed by the liturgist Pierre Jounel in an article in the review La Maison-Dieu in 1969, that gave English Ordinary Time and fixed usage[8]. The Latin thus stresses continuity rather than numbering: a season running through the whole year, in two stretches, on either side of the great summits.
Neither dead season nor weak season: the mystery of Christ in its fullness
The heart of the definition is given by the General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, the reference text promulgated in 1969. It must be quoted exactly, for it says the opposite of "nothing special":
"Apart from the seasons having their own distinctive character, there remain in the yearly cycle thirty-three or thirty-four weeks in which no particular aspect of the mystery of Christ is celebrated, but rather the mystery of Christ itself is honoured in its fullness, especially on Sundays. This period is known as Ordinary Time." — General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, no. 43[9]
The nuance is decisive. Advent awaits a coming; Christmas contemplates the Incarnation; Lent climbs towards the Cross; Easter radiates the Resurrection. Each of these seasons marks off one aspect of the mystery. Ordinary Time marks off nothing: it takes Christ whole, in the full extent of his preaching, his miracles, his parables, his encounters. That is why, Sunday after Sunday, continuous passages of one Gospel are read (see below). The paschal mystery is never absent — each Sunday remains the weekly Easter[10] — but it unfolds in duration rather than in festivity.
The contrast can be summed up in one sentence: the strong seasons celebrate one moment of Christ; Ordinary Time celebrates the whole life of Christ and makes it grow in our own.
When does Ordinary Time begin and end?
Ordinary Time is not a single continuous season: it comes in two blocks, separated by the whole heart of the liturgical year (Lent, Triduum, Eastertide). That is what makes it slightly disconcerting — and explains the strange numbering of its weeks.
Two blocks separated by Easter
The General Norms fix the boundaries precisely:
"Ordinary Time begins on the Monday which follows the Sunday occurring after 6 January and extends up to and including the Tuesday before the beginning of Lent; it begins again on the Monday after Pentecost Sunday and ends before First Vespers of the First Sunday of Advent." — General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, no. 44[11]
In other words, Ordinary Time occupies all that remains once the two great cycles are taken away. The first block fits between Christmastide and Lent; the second, much longer one, runs from the end of Eastertide to the threshold of Advent.
The first Ordinary Time: from the Baptism of the Lord to Lent
The first block opens on the Monday following the feast of the Baptism of the Lord[12]. This feast, which closes Christmastide, is itself a feast of the Lord: it falls on the Sunday after Epiphany (or, in some calendars, on the following Monday when Epiphany is transferred to Sunday). Ordinary Time therefore resumes the very next day and runs until the Tuesday evening before Ash Wednesday, the day on which Lent opens[13].
This first block is short and variable: it lasts four to nine weeks depending on the date of Easter[14]. The earlier Easter falls, the briefer it is; in some years, only the 5th or 6th week in Ordinary Time is reached before Lent begins.
The second Ordinary Time: from Pentecost to Christ the King
The second block resumes on the Monday after Pentecost, which closes Eastertide, and continues until the Saturday before the First Sunday of Advent[15]. It is by far the longest stretch of the year: some twenty weeks, from the end of spring to the end of November. It ends in apotheosis with the solemnity of Christ, King of the Universe, which closes the liturgical year before Advent reopens it[16].
The following table sums up the structure of the two blocks.
| Block | Beginning | End | Approximate length | Summit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ordinary Time I | Monday after the Baptism of the Lord | Tuesday before Ash Wednesday | 4 to 9 weeks | (leads into Lent) |
| — interruption — | Ash Wednesday | Pentecost | Lent, Triduum, Eastertide | Easter |
| Ordinary Time II | Monday after Pentecost | Saturday before the 1st Sunday of Advent | 23 to 30 weeks | Christ, King of the Universe (34th Sun.) |
The numbering of the weeks: why a week is sometimes "skipped"
This is the most technical point — and the most surprising. The weeks of Ordinary Time are numbered continuously from 1 to 34, across the two blocks: counting does not start again from zero after Pentecost. But since the paschal interruption does not "use up" a fixed number of weeks, an adjustment mechanism is needed so that the last week is always the 34th, that of Christ the King[17].
The principle is as follows. The weeks of the first block are counted up to Lent; for example, if the Tuesday before Ashes falls in the 8th week, counting resumes after Pentecost not necessarily at the 9th week, but at whichever week will make it possible to land exactly on the 34th before Advent. Depending on the year, one week is therefore omitted at the resumption: the "missing" week is simply passed over, its readings not being said that year[18]. It is a retrograde reckoning: the end is fixed first (34th week = Christ the King), then one works backwards to know at which week to resume.
This detail, which may look like a calendar quirk, has a strong logic: it guarantees that the liturgical year always ends on Christ the King, just before being reborn at Advent. The numbering serves the meaning.
The Sundays of Ordinary Time and their readings
If Ordinary Time "honours the mystery of Christ in its fullness, especially on Sundays"[19], it is because its Sundays are the place of a continuous reading of the Gospel. That is undoubtedly the finest particularity of this season.
Why there is no "First Sunday in Ordinary Time"
A detail often noticed: we hear of the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, never of the First. That is no mistake. The "First Sunday" would be the one immediately following 6 January — but that Sunday is already taken by the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which closes Christmas[20]. The numbering of the weeks does begin with the first, but the first Sunday of Ordinary Time is, in fact, absorbed by this feast of the Lord. The first genuinely "green" Sunday is therefore the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time[21].
The three-year Sunday cycle (A, B, C)
For Sundays, the Lectionary (stemming from the 1969 Ordo lectionum Missae) spreads the readings over a three-year cycle, designated by the letters A, B and C[22]. Each year gives pride of place to one of the three Synoptic Gospels:
- Year A: the Gospel according to Saint Matthew;
- Year B: the Gospel according to Saint Mark (completed by chapter 6 of Saint John, the "Bread of Life discourse");
- Year C: the Gospel according to Saint Luke.
The Gospel according to Saint John has no year of its own: it is read above all during Lent and Eastertide, and as a reinforcement of Year B. The year's letter changes on the First Sunday of Advent; we are therefore in Year A, B or C throughout the Ordinary Time that follows.
The semi-continuous reading of the Synoptic Gospels
From the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, and throughout the second block, the Gospel of the day follows a semi-continuous reading: the Gospel of the year is read in order, Sunday after Sunday, skipping only the passages already read in the strong seasons[23]. The faithful who come to Mass each Sunday of the same year thus hear unfolding, like a continuous narrative, the preaching and works of Christ according to Matthew, Mark or Luke.
That is exactly what the Second Vatican Council wanted, when it asked that "the table of the word of God" be opened more widely to the faithful:
"To celebrate the table of the word of God with greater riches for the faithful, the treasures of the Bible are to be opened up more lavishly, so that within a set number of years the most important part of Sacred Scripture may be read to the people." — Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, § 51[24]
The Second Sunday is the exception: before beginning the continuous reading, it takes up a Gospel of the Lord's manifestation (the wedding at Cana in Year C, for example), extending the theme of the Epiphany just closed[25].
The weekday readings: a two-year cycle (I and II)
On weekdays, the rhythm is different. The ferial Lectionary follows a two-year cycle, called Year I (civil years that are odd: 2025, 2027…) and Year II (even years: 2026, 2028…)[26]. Its particularity: the Gospel is the same in both years — it too is read semi-continuously — but the first reading and the psalm change from one year to the other. The weekday cycle is therefore less known to the faithful, but it offers, to those who follow daily Mass, a traversal of a great part of the Bible in two years.
The table below sums up this double reading mechanism, proper to Ordinary Time.
| Cycle | Length | Gospels | What changes | What stays |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sundays | 3 years (A · B · C) | A: Matthew · B: Mark · C: Luke | The Gospel changes each year | Continuous reading, in the order of the text |
| Weekdays | 2 years (I · II) | The same Gospel both years | 1st reading and psalm | The Gospel (semi-continuous) |
The great feasts punctuating Ordinary Time
To say that Ordinary Time is "without feasts" is doubly false: not only is each Sunday the weekly Easter, but the second block opens and closes on great solemnities of the Lord, and many feasts can take the place of a Sunday.
The solemnities of the Lord: Trinity, Corpus Christi, Sacred Heart
Three major solemnities follow one another at the very start of the second block, in the weeks after Pentecost:
- The Most Holy Trinity, on the Sunday after Pentecost: having celebrated the Father, the Son and the Spirit throughout the year, the Church contemplates the very mystery of God, one and three[27];
- the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi), on the Thursday after Trinity — or the following Sunday where the feast is not a holy day of obligation — which extends the thanksgiving of Holy Thursday in the light of Easter[28]; its processional dimension is the subject of the article The Procession of the Blessed Sacrament;
- the Sacred Heart of Jesus, on the Friday after the Second Sunday after Pentecost, feast of Christ's love for men[29].
These solemnities are not intruders in Ordinary Time: they are its entrance porch, unfolding, once Pentecost is closed, the great mysteries the whole year has just traversed.
Christ the King, crowning of the year
The second block — and the whole liturgical year — ends with the solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, on the thirty-fourth and last Sunday in Ordinary Time. This feast is recent: it was instituted by Pope Pius XI in the encyclical Quas primas of 11 December 1925, in response to the secularisation of societies and the public denial of Christ's kingship[30]. Originally placed in October, it was moved by the 1969 reform to the last Sunday of the liturgical year, a far more eloquent position: the whole cycle issues in the final reign of Christ.
"Christ must therefore reign in the mind of man […], reign in the will […], and reign finally in the heart of man." — Pius XI, encyclical Quas primas, 11 December 1925[31]
The feasts that can take the place of a Sunday
Lastly, because the Sundays in Ordinary Time celebrate "no particular aspect" of Christ's mystery, they give way to the solemnities and feasts of the Lord falling on that day[32]. Several great feasts of the calendar can thus "occupy" a green Sunday:
| Feast / solemnity | Date | What it celebrates |
|---|---|---|
| Presentation of the Lord | 2 February | Jesus presented in the Temple ("Candlemas") |
| Transfiguration of the Lord | 6 August | Christ transfigured on the mountain |
| Exaltation of the Holy Cross | 14 September | The mystery of the glorious Cross |
| Dedication of the Lateran Basilica | 9 November | The "mother of all churches" of Rome |
| All Saints | 1 November | All the saints of heaven |
| Commemoration of the Dead | 2 November | The faithful departed ("All Souls") |
To these feasts of the Lord are added the memorials of the saints, far more numerous in Ordinary Time than in the strong seasons: it is in this long green space that most of the sanctoral cycle unfolds, treated in the article The Calendar of Saints.
Green: the colour of hope and growth
The colour of the vestments in Ordinary Time is green. Like all liturgical colours, this is not a decorative choice but a language. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal fixes the use of green for this season[33], and tradition reads in it the colour of hope and growth: the colour of vegetation, of ripening fields, of rising sap[34].
The symbolism is apt. The strong seasons have their radiant or austere colours — the white of glory, the red of blood and fire, the purple of penance. Green is the colour of what lasts and grows slowly: not the explosion of the feast, but the patient growth of the Christian life between feasts. It says visually what Ordinary Time is: the season in which the grace received at the great solemnities does its work over time, like a seed rising noiselessly.
"The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how." — Gospel according to Saint Mark 4:26–27[35]
How Ordinary Time was born
Ordinary Time, under this name and in this unified form, is recent: it dates from the 1969 liturgical reform. But the reality it covers — the weeks "between the feasts" — is very ancient.
Before 1969: "after Epiphany" and "after Pentecost"
In the Roman calendar before the reform, there was no single continuous "Ordinary Time". Two series of Sundays were counted separately: the Sundays after Epiphany (between Christmas and Lent) and the Sundays after Pentecost (from summer to Advent)[36]. These divisions, among the oldest in the calendar, have their roots in the old Roman sacramentaries, including the Gelasian Sacramentary[37]. The "season after Pentecost" was moreover markedly longer than its present equivalent and bore a strong eschatological colouring of expectation.
The parenthesis of Septuagesima
Between the Sundays after Epiphany and Lent came, in the old rite, a three-Sunday pre-Lent with evocative Latin names: Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima ("seventieth, sixtieth, fiftieth" day before Easter, in round figures). The vestments were already purple and the Alleluia was laid aside: it was a gradual ascent towards Lent. The 1969 reform abolished this season of Septuagesima, whose weeks were folded back into Ordinary Time[38]. (It survives in the older form of the Roman rite.)
The 1969 reform: unification into a single season
It is the motu proprio Mysterii paschalis of Paul VI, dated 14 February 1969, that promulgates the new General Norms and institutes Ordinary Time as we know it[39]. The great novelty is not only a name: it is unification. Where there had been two separately numbered series of Sundays ("after Epiphany", "after Pentecost"), there is now a single Ordinary Time whose weeks are counted continuously from 1 to 34, simply interrupted by the great paschal cycle[40]. The pre-Lent disappears, the boundaries are clarified, and the continuous reading of the Gospels is put in place.
Pierre Jounel and the invention of the name
There remained to name this new reality. It is the French liturgist Pierre Jounel, a member of the Consilium charged with the reform, who forged the expression "Temps Ordinaire" in a 1969 article in the review La Maison-Dieu[41]. The official Latin retained, Tempus per annum, stresses continuity ("through the year"), while the French word ordinaire refers to the order of the numbered weeks[42]. The name has prospered in every language — at the price, as we have seen, of a persistent misunderstanding this article has endeavoured to dispel.
The spirituality of Ordinary Time
What remains is the essential: what is to be lived during this long green season? Its very discretion makes it a powerful spiritual master.
The season of the Church on the march
If the spiritual meaning of Ordinary Time had to be summed up, one would say: it is the season of the Church on the march. The great feasts make us relive the events of salvation; Ordinary Time makes us live what comes after — the long road of the pilgrim Church between Pentecost and Christ's return. The second block, running from the descent of the Spirit to Christ the King, thus sketches in miniature the whole history of the Church: born in the Upper Room, she journeys under the Spirit's guidance towards the final Kingdom.
The Catechism recalls that the whole liturgical year, and therefore this season of growth, is not a fixed commemoration but a presence: through it, "the mystery of Redemption" is rendered present in every age, so that the faithful "may lay hold of it and be filled with the grace of salvation"[43].
Dom Guéranger: the season of the Spirit and of everyday holiness
The great 19th-century liturgist, Dom Prosper Guéranger (1805–1875), restorer of Solesmes Abbey, devoted several volumes of his Liturgical Year to the "season after Pentecost". In it he saw the season in which the Church, having contemplated all the mysteries of Christ, now lives under the inward action of the Holy Spirit, leading the faithful towards everyday holiness. In his famous General Preface, he defined the whole liturgical cycle in a formula that also illuminates the green season:
"The Ecclesiastical Year […] is nothing other than the manifestation of Jesus Christ and of his mysteries in the Church and in the faithful soul." — Dom Prosper Guéranger, L'Année liturgique, General Preface[44]
This "manifestation in the faithful soul" is precisely the slow work of Ordinary Time: no longer contemplating one mystery after another, but letting the whole Christ take shape within oneself, Sunday after Sunday, week after week.
Sanctifying everyday time
Ordinary Time is also the season of everyday life sanctified. Its lesson is that holiness is not played out only on the summits — Christmas, Easter — but in the ordinary fabric of days: work, family, the duties of one's state in life, faithful prayer. That is what the Catechism calls praying "in the events of each day":
"We learn to pray at certain moments by hearing the Word of the Lord and sharing in his Paschal mystery, but his Spirit is offered us at all times, in the events of each day, to make prayer spring up from us." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2659[45]
It is also the meaning of what the spiritual tradition, following Saint Jean-Pierre de Caussade, has called the "sacrament of the present moment": God gives himself and is received in the ordinary moment, in humble faithfulness to what the passing hour asks[46]. Ordinary Time, by its very length and lack of glitter, is a school of abandonment: it teaches us to find God not in the extraordinary, but in the given everyday.
The green that grows: growing without the blaze of the great feasts
The initial prejudice can thus be reversed. Ordinary Time is not the season "when nothing happens": it is the season when the most happens, but noiselessly. Like the seed that sprouts "whether he sleeps or rises"[47], the grace of the great feasts works in depth in the long green season. The spiritual life, like nature, does its most decisive work in discreet duration, not only on visible summits.
At its term, Ordinary Time issues in Christ the King: all this patient growth has an end, the fully established reign of God. Then Advent reopens the cycle, and the Church begins growing again. Nothing, in the Christian life, is truly "ordinary" — not even the season that bears the name.
To go further
Notes and References
General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar (Normae universales de anno liturgico et de calendario), promulgated by Paul VI on 14 February 1969 (motu proprio Mysterii paschalis), no. 43. Reference text: Roman Missal, third typical edition. English text of the passage from the Vatican edition: "there remain in the yearly cycle thirty-three or thirty-four weeks in which no particular aspect of the mystery of Christ is celebrated, but rather the mystery of Christ itself is honoured in its fullness, especially on Sundays. This period is known as Ordinary Time."
1 2 9 19Michael P. Foley, "The Mysterious Meaning of 'Ordinary Time'", New Liturgical Movement, February 2020. Foley recalls that the word ordinary refers here to the ordinal numbers by which the weeks are counted (1st to 34th), not to the everyday sense of "banal"; that the official Latin name is Tempus per annum ("the season through the year"); and that before 1969 these weeks were counted separately as "time after Epiphany" and "time after Pentecost", ancient divisions attested as far back as the Gelasian Sacramentary.
3 4 5 6 36 37 40 42The French expression "Temps Ordinaire" was introduced by the liturgist Pierre Jounel (1914–2002), member of the Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de sacra Liturgia, in an article in the review La Maison-Dieu in 1969; it gave English Ordinary Time. The official Latin name remains Tempus per annum, "the season through the year". See Michael P. Foley, art. cit.
7 8 41Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§ 1166–1167: Sunday, the "Lord's Day", is the foundation and kernel of the whole liturgical year; each week it celebrates Easter, including during Ordinary Time. The detail is treated in the article Sunday.
10General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, no. 44. Original: "Ordinary Time begins on the Monday which follows the Sunday occurring after 6 January and extends up to and including the Tuesday before the beginning of Lent; it begins again on the Monday after Pentecost Sunday and ends before First Vespers of the First Sunday of Advent."
11 13 15The feast of the Baptism of the Lord closes Christmastide; it is celebrated on the Sunday after Epiphany (or the following Monday when, in some countries, Epiphany is transferred to Sunday 7 or 8 January). The first block of Ordinary Time begins the next day. See General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, nos. 33 and 44.
12 20The length of the first block depends on the date of Easter: the earlier Easter falls, the earlier Lent begins, and the shorter Ordinary Time I is (four to nine weeks). Overview of the lengths of the seasons in the article The Liturgical Year.
14The solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe closes the liturgical year on the 34th and last Sunday in Ordinary Time; Advent at once reopens the cycle. See no. 44 of the Norms and the encyclical Quas primas (Pius XI, 1925).
16The numbering mechanism is explained in the official liturgical calendars (e.g. Liturgy Office, Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, "Ordinary Time"). The 34 weeks are numbered continuously across the two blocks; since the paschal interruption does not use up a fixed number of weeks, one week is omitted at the resumption after Pentecost in the years where necessary, so that the 34th week always coincides with the solemnity of Christ the King. The reckoning is thus done "backwards" from that end.
17 18The first Sunday following 6 January being taken by the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, the first properly "green" Sunday is the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time. This Second Sunday keeps a Gospel of the Lord's manifestation (e.g. the wedding at Cana, Jn 2, in Year C), before the semi-continuous reading begins on the Third Sunday.
21 25Ordo lectionum Missae (Roman Lectionary), 1969, revised 1981. For Sundays and solemnities, the readings are spread over a three-year cycle: Year A (Saint Matthew), Year B (Saint Mark, with Jn 6), Year C (Saint Luke). Saint John's Gospel is read above all in Lent and Eastertide. The cycle changes on the First Sunday of Advent.
22Ordo lectionum Missae, Praenotanda (introduction), on the semi-continuous reading: during Ordinary Time, the Gospel of the year is read Sunday after Sunday in the order of the text, from the Third Sunday onwards, omitting the passages already proclaimed in the other seasons. The first reading (Old Testament) is chosen in harmony with the Gospel of the day.
23Second Vatican Council, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium, § 51, promulgated 4 December 1963. Full text on vatican.va. This conciliar wish to "open the treasures of the Bible more lavishly" is precisely what the 1969 Lectionary realised through its multi-year cycles.
24For the weekdays of Ordinary Time, the Lectionary follows a two-year cycle: Year I (odd civil years) and Year II (even years). The Gospel is identical in both years (read semi-continuously); only the first reading and the responsorial psalm differ. See Ordo lectionum Missae, Praenotanda.
26The solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity is celebrated on the Sunday following Pentecost. It commemorates no event of salvation but contemplates the mystery of God, one in three Persons, after the liturgical year has manifested in turn the Father, the Son and the Spirit. See Calendarium Romanum generale, 1969.
27The solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi) is celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity — transferred to the following Sunday in countries where it is not a holy day of obligation. Instituted for the universal Church by Urban IV (bull Transiturus, 1264), it extends the mystery of Holy Thursday. Its processional dimension is treated in the article The Procession of the Blessed Sacrament.
28The solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is celebrated on the Friday following the Second Sunday after Pentecost (the Friday after the Corpus Christi octave). It honours Christ's love for men, symbolised by his Heart. See Calendarium Romanum generale, 1969.
29Pius XI, encyclical Quas primas, 11 December 1925, instituting the feast of Christ the King. Text on vatican.va. The 1969 reform transferred the feast, at first fixed on the last Sunday of October, to the last Sunday of the liturgical year (34th of Ordinary Time), thus giving it an eschatological scope: the whole cycle issues in Christ's reign. The quoted passage is from the body of the encyclical on Christ's reign in the mind, will and heart of man.
30 31General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, nos. 5 and 16: by reason of its importance, Sunday gives way only to solemnities and feasts of the Lord; but the Sundays in Ordinary Time, celebrating no particular aspect of Christ's mystery, may be replaced by a solemnity or feast of the Lord falling on that day (Presentation, Transfiguration, glorious Cross, Dedication of the Lateran, etc.).
32General Instruction of the Roman Missal (Institutio generalis Missalis Romani), no. 346: the colour green is used during Ordinary Time (Tempus per annum), as distinct from white (seasons and feasts of joy), red (Passion, Pentecost, martyrs) and purple (Advent and Lent).
33Liturgical tradition reads green as the colour of hope and growth — the colour of vegetation and of developing life. See Catholic Culture, "Our Ordinary Walk of Life: Understanding Tempus per Annum", which recalls that the green of Ordinary Time evokes "hope, but also new life and growth".
34Gospel according to Saint Mark 4:26–27 (parable of the seed growing of itself). The parable, proper to Saint Mark, illustrates the silent growth of the Kingdom — a fitting image of Ordinary Time, the season of growth.
35 47The 1969 reform abolished from the renewed Roman calendar the season of Septuagesima (the three Sundays of Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima preceding Lent in the old rite, with purple vestments and no Alleluia), whose weeks were folded back into Ordinary Time. This pre-Lent survives in the earlier form of the Roman rite (1962 Missal).
38Paul VI, motu proprio Mysterii paschalis, 14 February 1969, approving the new General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the General Roman Calendar. This is the text that institutes the unified Ordinary Time and the continuous numbering of its weeks. Text on vatican.va.
39Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§ 1163–1165: the Church, "in the course of the year, unfolds the whole mystery of Christ" and, "recalling the mysteries of Redemption, opens to the faithful the riches of her Lord's saving acts, so that they may be made in some way present at all times".
43Dom Prosper Guéranger (1805–1875), L'Année liturgique, General Preface (first volume, L'Avent, 1841). Solesmes Abbey / Desclée. Guéranger, restorer of the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes, devoted several volumes to the "season after Pentecost", which he reads as the season of the Holy Spirit's action leading the Church and the soul towards everyday holiness.
44Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2659: "We learn to pray at certain moments by hearing the Word of the Lord and sharing in his Paschal mystery, but his Spirit is offered us at all times, in the events of each day, to make prayer spring up from us." The paragraph teaches that prayer springs also from "the events of each day" — the heart of Ordinary Time spirituality.
45The expression "sacrament of the present moment" belongs to the teaching of the Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675–1751), notably in L'Abandon à la divine Providence: God gives himself in the ordinary moment, and the soul finds him by faithfully accomplishing, moment after moment, what its duty of state requires. This spirituality of everyday life illuminates the meaning of the long "ordinary" season of the year.
46