The Lingering Problems of Ordinary Time: Guest Article by Michael P. Foley

The Lingering Problems of Ordinary Time

By Michael P. Foley

In a previous article, we noted that the 1969 Missal’s Tempus per annum marks a break from the Roman liturgical tradition in three ways, and that the term “Ordinary Time” does not signify “Mundane Time” or “Ordinal Time” but an “Ordinary of Times,” a standard and nondescript season that stands in contrast to the “proper” seasons of Christmas and Easter. It is our hope that this explanation will put to rest fears that a season (which in the new calendar occupies half of the entire year) was deliberately profaned or desacralized and made, well, ordinary.

But we must be honest: there are still problems both with the term “Ordinary Time” and with the new Tempus per annum that may lead to an unintentional desacralization.

Regarding Ordinary Time as an Ordinary of Seasons:

1. The analogy is flawed. The intriguing concept of an “Ordinary of Seasons” essentially presupposes an analogy between it and the Ordinary of the Mass or of the Divine Office, but such an analogy taken to this level is misleading. The Ordinary of the Mass, for example, is not self-sufficient; for the Mass to be celebrated, it must be completed by propers, and these propers necessarily make the Mass a specific celebration in contradistinction to others. A Mass in Ordinary Time, by contrast, includes its own propers, nor does it need to be completed by the Proper of Seasons in order to be celebrated.

2. An Ordinary of Seasons is pastorally ineffective. As an organizational principle for liturgists, it is a useful construct; but as a liturgical season for the entire people of God, it is befuddling and, as we have seen all too clearly, prone to misinterpretation.

3. An Ordinary of Seasons is an abstraction. Abstract concepts have their place in sacred liturgy and the study thereof, but the seasons themselves should be anchored in the concrete aspects of a particular part of the year. A season that attempts to be generic without being specific runs the risk of being more Cartesian than Incarnational, more Gnostic than Christian.

And regarding the 1969 Missal’s Tempus per annum:

1. It is incoherent. It is bizarre to hold something as distinct insofar it lacks distinction, and it is especially bizarre where the notion of a season is concerned, for an indistinct season is almost a contradiction in terms. In liturgy as in nature, seasons emerge as seasons because they have qualities that distinguish them from other seasons; they have differentiae which make them specifically different from others in their genus. And since when does a single natural season of the year have two phases? Not even an Indian or Martinmas summer qualifies, for it is a fluke appearance of atypical weather in the midst of autumn, not an orderly “second phase” of summer. The very notion of a season is undermined by this artificial tempus interruptum construction.

2. It is based on a false claim. In his writings Jounel links indistinction with purity and purity with the early Church. Each of the new Sundays in Ordinary Time, he writes, “is a Lord’s Day in its pure state as presented to us in the Church’s tradition,” that is, the state in which the primitive Church celebrated it. In claiming to have reconstructed or returned to the worship of the early Church, Jounel shows a confidence that most liturgical scholars today are careful to avoid.

But Jounel also admits that Ordinary Time as a single block is an innovation. As we mentioned in the previous post, the earliest sacramentary shows the Church celebrating the Time after Theophany (Epiphany) and the Time after Pentecost. But even if you insist that the Church had a different liturgical year prior to this eighth-century text, you must nevertheless concede that in whatever manner the early Christians may have worshipped, it is high unlikely that they conceived of these periods in the same manner as Jounel, for the simple reason that Jounel himself admits that he has invented something new. Jounel’s confidence therefore belies the experience of the early Church. Even if he and his colleagues succeeded in the herculean task of resurrecting Sunday in all its pristine integrity, today’s faithful are not experiencing the Lord’s Day in its pure state when their experience of it is filtered through the titular hermeneutic of Ordinary Time or Tempus per annum.

3. It is contradictory. Ordinary Time is supposed to be indistinct, but by the Church’s own admission, it isn’t. According to the Congregation for Divine Worship, Ordinary Time has a highly-structured, three-year lectionary in which “each year is distinctive… because it unfolds the doctrine proper to each of the synoptic Gospels” (emphasis added). Indeed, Ordinary Time may be even more distinctive than the Time after Pentecost that it replaced, insofar as its Gospel readings are logically planned from beginning to end: “There is a common pattern followed in all three cycles: the early weeks deal with the beginning of Christ’s public ministry, the final weeks have an eschatological theme, and the intervening weeks take in sequence various events and teachings from our Lord’s life.” Ordinary Time is also distinctive for including the Solemnity of Christ the King, which celebrates a particular aspect of Christ’s mystery (His kingship over the universe) and which was moved from the Sanctoral Cycle to the Temporal in 1969, even though Ordinary Time is supposed to be distinctive for refraining from celebrating a “particular aspect of the mystery of Christ.”

4. It is mystagogically problematic. For the great liturgist Blessed Columba Marmion, “there is no surer way, no more infallible means, of causing us to resemble Christ” than entering into the mysteries of Jesus through the liturgy and its annual rhythm. [1] When “we contemplate in their successive order the different mysteries of Christ, we do so…with the object that our souls may participate in a special set of circumstances of the sacred humanity and may draw forth, from each of those circumstances, the specific grace it has pleased the Divine Master to attach to it” (emphasis added). [2] For Marmion, the Time after Epiphany is the season for contemplating the “special circumstances” concerning the “wondrous exchange” of the Incarnation and the hidden life of the Holy Family in Nazareth [3] while the Time after Pentecost “symbolizes in particular the pilgrimage of the Church in this life” [4] as an extension of our Lord’s reign through the Holy Spirit.

The GIRM, on the other hand, states that rather than celebrate a particular aspect of the mystery of Christ like the other seasons, Ordinary Time “commemorates the very mystery of Christ in its fullness” (ipsum mysterium Christi in sua plenitudine recolitur). The official English translation for this passage, “the mystery of Christ in all its aspects,” omits the ipsum in ipsum mysterium, a pronoun that places an emphasis on the mystery taken as a whole—the very mystery in and of itself, in its fullness, all at once, and not sequentially (as the “proper” seasons do). Yet as we just noted, this is precisely what the new Lectionary does: its Gospel pericopes begin with the beginning of Christ’s ministry, continue with various teachings and events in His life (which, as Marmion rightly observes, necessarily reveal “particular aspects” of the mystery of Christ), and conclude with eschatological themes. There is, therefore, a tension between the explanatory account of the season and its actual content.

More to the point, having a season recollect the ipsum mysterium Christi in sua plenitudine implicitly discourages a “successive” appropriation of the mysteries of Christ that confers “specific graces” attached to them by the Divine Master. The GIRM appears to be stating that such an appropriation is the function of the “proper” seasons of Christmas and Easter only. Yet if this is true, then the approximately six months of the year that comprise the Temporal Cycle of the 1969 calendar no longer have a clear mystagogical point of entry.

All of which is to say that the difficulties with the 1969 Missal’s Tempus per annum run deeper than the name it popularly bears.

A chart of the traditional Roman liturgical cycle

NOTES
[1] Dom Columba Marmion, Christ in His Mysteries, trans. Alan Bancroft (Bethesda, MD: Zaccheus Press, 2008), 32.
[2] Marmion, Christ in His Mysteries, 29, 30.
[3] Marmion, Christ in His Mysteries, 29, 175 ff.
[4] Marmion, Le Christe dans Ses Mystères, 494, trans. mine.

This article is a summary of a more extensive and scholarly treatment: “The Origins and Meaning of Ordinary Time,” Antiphon: A Journal of Liturgical Renewal 23.1 (2019): 43-77.

The Mysterious Meaning of “Ordinary Time”: Guest Article by Michael P. Foley

We are very grateful to Dr. Foley for sending to NLM a two-part article that definitively explains where the term “Ordinary Time” came from, debunking along the way a number of persistent myths about it, while presenting (in part 2) a deeper critique than has hitherto been available.

The Mysterious Meaning of “Ordinary Time”

By Michael P. Foley

Ordinary Time is here again, and with it the usual confusion and finger-wagging over the meaning of its name. “Abolish Ordinary Time,” insists K. E. Colombini in an article by that title. “In the Christian life and in this age,” he asks, “how can any time honestly be deemed ordinary?” George Weigel agrees: Ordinary Time, he laments, is a “terminological abomination.” David Warren goes further. “Ordinary Time” is not only an abominable name for a liturgical season but a sadly appropriate description of the failure of the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council to renew the life of the Church. “We have been living through decades of ‘Ordinary Time,’ in which the Church was subjected to humanly calculated ‘reforms,’” Warren writes. “Let us earnestly pray they will be over—that we may soon resume the practice of the extraordinary.”

Of course, all these critiques assume that the adjective in the title “Ordinary Time” refers to that which is mundane, unexceptional, and humdrum. But are they right?

To answer this question, we must first determine what this “green season” is in the 1969/2002 Roman Missal and then examine the extra-liturgical origin of the term “ordinary time.” For one of the peculiarities facing us is that “Ordinary Time” appears nowhere in the Latin typical edition of the new Missal.

Tempus per annum

Rather than a Tempus ordinarium (“ordinary time” in Latin), the 1969 Missal mentions a Tempus per annum—literally, a “season throughout the year.” This in itself is a novel departure from Roman liturgical tradition. The phrase tempus per annum appears fleetingly for the first time in the 1960 General Rubrics and then in the 1962 Missal, but the green seasons after Epiphany and Pentecost are still called the Time after Epiphany and the Time after Pentecost. Although both periods shared much in common, they were nonetheless treated as virtually two different seasons that were imbued by the spirit of the great feast that each followed. One indication of their relative integrity is that each season was numbered separately: the Sundays after Epiphany were counted from the Feast of the Epiphany, and the Sundays after Pentecost were counted from the Feast of Pentecost.

The 1969 Missal, on the other hand, introduces three novelties:

1. It eliminates the Times after Epiphany and Pentecost, which are the oldest recorded demarcations for these periods of the year that we have (the Gelasian sacramentary lists the Sundays after Theophany and after Pentecost).

2. It treats the new Tempus per annum as one continuous season interrupted by Lent and Easter: in the words of Annibale Bugnini, it is now one “block” (un blocco unico) that occurs in two phases (fasi). Cementing this “single block” is a new method of counting the Sundays within it. The new season begins on the Monday after the Sunday following January 6 and begins again on the Monday after Pentecost, and when it begins again, the count is resumed from where it had left off, that is, from the Sunday before Ash Wednesday.

3. The goal of this new season is to have Sundays that are as nondistinctive as possible. According to the 1969 Normae Universales, whereas other seasons “have their own proper character” with a focus on a particular mystery of Christ, the Sundays of Tempus per annum are supposed to recall “the very mystery of Christ in its fullness.” How? By being, in the words of Msgr. Pierre Jounel (the 1967-1969 relator of the Consilium subcommittee responsible for the new calendar), “the ideal Christian Sunday without any further specification… a Lord’s Day in its pure state.”

“Ordinary Time”

But where is “Ordinary Time” in all this? It is not, as I have mentioned, in the Latin, nor is it in the very first vernacular editions of the Missal: The 1970 English edition of the new Lectionary, for example, translates Tempus per annum as “Season ‘of the Year.’” It is mentioned on occasion in Annibale Bugnini’s Reform of the Liturgy, but I suspect that he added these only later, perhaps when he was editing his book in the late 1970s and after the term had become popular in the early to mid-1970s (he uses the term Tempus per annum more than twice as much as Tempo Ordinario).

The creator of this term, as far as I can tell, is Bugnini’s collaborator, the relator Pierre Jounel. In a 1969 French article about the new calendar in the journal Maison-Dieu, Jounel casually introduces the new Tempus per annum as Temps Ordinaire. Here is my translation:

The notion of Ordinary Time [temps ordinaire] (Tempus "per annum") was introduced in the time of Pius X to designate the weeks from Epiphany to Septuagesima and from Trinity Sunday to Advent (Time after Epiphany and after Pentecost). The novelty introduced today is to consider this Ordinary Time as a unit of thirty-three or thirty-four weeks, "in which no particular aspect of the mystery of Christ is celebrated. Instead, the very mystery of Christ is commemorated in its fullness, especially on Sunday" (1969 Normae Universales). Thus the Christocentric character of the liturgical year is clearly affirmed.

Prescinding from Jounel’s misleading claim that Pius X introduced a new concept for the Times after Epiphany and Pentecost, let us turn to his implicit definition of temps ordinaire, beginning with what he does not mean.

Ordinal Time?

We are often told to interpret Ordinary Time as Ordinal Time because of the ordinal numbering of its Sundays and to think of the season as “ordered time,” “counted time,” “numbered time,” or “growing time.” The latter concept has the most credibility because it is currently supported by the USCCB; but as we will see later, this interpretation is at odds with both the 1969 Normae Universales and the later GIRMs, and it is nowhere to be found in Jounel’s writings. Further, in French—as in Latin and English—there are different words for “ordinary” (ordinarius) and “ordinal” (ordinalis). If Jounel or his colleagues wanted to designate an “Ordinal” Time, they could have done so.

Mundane Time?

The second possibility, which seems to upset thoughtful Catholics the most, is viewing Ordinary Time as Mundane or Run-of-the-Mill Time. They are right to be alarmed, for there would indeed be something disjointed about a liturgical year centered on the sacred mysteries of Christ having a “time-out” section where we forget, even for a moment, how all time and history have been forever changed by the Resurrection, especially when that “time-out” takes up 50% of the year. Happily, this was not Jounel’s intention either; at least, there is no evidence that it was.

Ordinary of Seasons?

Rather, by “Ordinary Time” Jounel appears to have envisioned an “Ordinary of Times,” that is, a standard season in contrast to the special seasons of Christmastide and Eastertide. Just as the calendar’s Temporal Cycle of special seasons is the Proper of Seasons (Proprium de Tempore), Tempus per annum is now to be the Ordinary of Seasons. Just as there is an Ordinary of the Mass (Ordo Missae) and an Ordinary of the Divine Office (Ordinarium divini Officii), now there is an Ordinary of the Year. Masses during this time function as a basic template for divine worship: “profoundly restored” to “their pure state” (to use Jounel’s words), they serve as “the ideal” onto which more proper elements are added at other times in order to make a distinctive season. In French, Ordo Missae and Ordinarium Divini Officii are both translated with the noun Ordinaire, and so when the francophone Jounel coined Temps Ordinaire he may have been thinking of the meaning of ordinaire in its form as a noun. This notion of an Ordinary of Seasons is implicitly corroborated by Bugnini’s explanation mentioned above and by the GIRM, both of which contrast the “proper” seasons with the common or “ordinary” season, not unlike a contrast between the changing propers of the Mass and its relatively unchanging parts like the Kyrie or Gloria.

So there you have it. But although Catholics may be relieved to learn that “Ordinary Time” does not mean “Mundane Time,” they are not out of the woods yet. There are lingering problems both with the term “Ordinary Time” and with the new Tempus per annum. To these we will turn in tomorrow’s post.

This article is a summary of a more extensive and scholarly treatment: “The Origins and Meaning of Ordinary Time,” Antiphon: A Journal of Liturgical Renewal 23.1 (2019): 43-77.