CHURCH YEAR

annual cycle of seasons and days observed in the Christian churches in commemoration of the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ and of his virtues as exhibited in the lives of the saints. annual cycle of seasons and days observed in Christian churches in commemoration of the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ and of the virtues derived from him as exhibited in the lives of the Christian saints. The church year represents the sanctifying of the seasons for the purposes of Christian worship. Though based on the weekly Lord's day, it is generally thought of in terms of the annual festivals. Its structure is formed by the six festivals of Christmas, Epiphany, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost or Whitsunday. The first five of these commemorate events in the earthly life of Jesus Christ; the last commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles, which began the work of the church. As the earliest members of the church were Jews, they naturally kept the Jewish liturgical year, with its ordered series of festivals and holy seasons. Of these, the chief was the Passover, which Christian Jews undoubtedly associated not only with the deliverance of the Jews from Egypt but also with the deliverance of Jesus from death. Similarly, the Jewish Pentecost, a harvest festival celebrating also the revelation of the Law to Moses, acquired Christian associations with Jesus' ascension and the descent of the Holy Spirit. The Early Christian celebrations of Passover (Greek: Pascha; the three-day festival commemorating the death and resurrection of Jesus) and Pentecost were movable feasts, as Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost, and Ascension still are; i.e., they are not kept on a fixed day of the calendar but vary in date from year to year depending on the incidence of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Christmas and Epiphany, the other two festivals that form the structure of the church year, were not taken over from Judaism and are fixed to certain dates in the calendar. The older of them, Epiphany, on January 6, is first known to have been kept in the 3rd century, though it may be older. It celebrated the manifestation (Greek epiphaneia) of God to the world in Jesus Christ. The evolution of Good Friday and Easter out of the earlier Pascha took place at Jerusalem, probably in the third quarter of the 4th century. In the second quarter of the same century, the birth of Christ was already being kept on December 25 in Rome. Before the end of the century its relationship to and distinction from Epiphany had been worked out in the eastern half of the empire, notably in Constantinople, Cappadocia, and Antioch. It was probably in this same area that Ascension became detached from Pentecost and kept on its own, 40 days after Easter. Thus, by the end of the 4th century, the basic pattern of the church year had been established. The Eastern Orthodox church regards the church year as beginning with Easter, the greatest of the festivals, commemorating the victory of Christ over sin and death. Lent, the period of fasting and prayer in preparation for Easter, thus comes at the end of the year, which concludes with the Easter vigil. Christmas and Epiphany, always on December 25 and January 6, respectively, are not part of this series; they are found in the Menaion, which contains the readings for each fixed holy day from September 1 (the beginning of the Byzantine civil year) to August 31 and corresponds to the Western Proper of the Saints. It was the Jerusalem system, with its cycle from the Nativity to Pentecost, that was taken over by the Western church as its Proper of the Time (i.e., temporal cycle) and later underwent modifications and additions. Important developments were the addition of the two seasons of Advent (penitential season of four weeks before Christmas) and Septuagesima (the two and a half weeks before Lent), and the inclusion of five saints' days after Christmas in the Proper of the Time. The other saints' days form a separate list, the Proper of the Saints, which includes also the festivals of Christ unconnected with the main cycle of the church year; e.g., the Transfiguration (August 6) and the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14). The increase in number and importance of saints' days of various times has threatened to obscure the cycle of the church year, and prunings periodically have had to be made. Saints' days are transferred if in any year they fall on the same day as a major festival. The Roman Catholic calendar was revised in 1969. In the revision, the season of Septuagesima was eliminated and the Sundays after Epiphany and after Pentecost were renumbered as Sundays in Ordinary Time. These changes led to revisions in Lutheran and Anglican service books, and other Protestant denominations that had discarded much of the traditional church year during the Reformation showed interest in recovering some of the major feasts and seasons. Additional reading Louis Duchesne, Christian Worship: Its Origin and Evolution, 5th ed. (1919, reprinted 1956; originally published in French, 4th rev. and enl. ed., 1908), ch. 8, is fundamental but should be supplemented by later handbooks, such as J.A. Jungmann, Public Worship (1957, reissued 1966; originally published in German, 1955), ch. 9; and John H. Miller, Fundamentals of the Liturgy (1960, reprinted 1964), ch. 8. Good summary accounts are those of Nole M. Denis-boulet, The Christian Calendar (1960; originally published in French, 1959); A. Alan McArthur, The Evolution of the Christian Year (1953); and Adolf Adam, The Liturgical Year: Its History & Its Meaning After the Reform of the Liturgy (1981), basic for present Roman Catholic use. Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (1986), is a fresh reading of the early evidence. More popular treatments, valuable for their detail of popular observance, are the works of Francis X. Weiser, The Christmas Book (1952, reissued 1954), The Easter Book (1954), The Holyday Book (1956), and Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs: The Year of the Lord in Liturgy and Folklore (1958). See also Sue Samuelson, Christmas: An Annotated Bibliography (1982). Insights into primitive and non-Christian backgrounds of the church year are contained in Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954, reprinted 1974; originally published in French, 1949); and E.O. James, Seasonal Feasts and Festivals (1961, reprinted 1963). For Jewish background, see Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (1961, reissued 1973; originally published in French, 2 vol., 195860), pt. 4, ch. 1518. A standard monograph on the origin of the seven-day week is F.H. Colson, The Week (1926, reprinted 1974). Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (1985), is a comprehensive historical, cultural, and sociological study. More exhaustive and detailed is Willy Rordorf, Sunday: The History of the Day of Rest and Worship in the Earliest Centuries of the Christian Church (1968; originally published in German, 1962). For historical discussions of Holy Week and Easter, see Massey H. Shepherd, Jr., The Paschal Liturgy and the Apocalypse (1960); and John Walton Tyrer, Historical Survey of Holy Week: Its Services and Ceremonial (1932). Clarence Seidenspinner, Great Protestant Festivals (1952), defends nontraditional observances in modern Protestant churches. The Rev. Massey H. Shepherd, Jr.