29 April 2014

Messing Up The Calendar

.
For some bizarre reason, it was thought in the time of Pius XII that making Mayday, which had been adopted by communists and socialists as their holiday, the feast of St Joseph the Worker, communism and socialism would be utterly defeated, or neutralised, or something, or at least it would give Italian men an excuse to have the day off on 1 May and walk up and down a bit.  This is the sort of thing that happens when you take the Papal States off somebody and don't define their new job properly.

The problem is that 1 May already is a feast, and an important one at that.  It is the feast of SS Philip and James, two of the twelve apostles.  So they have to be moved (they can't be ignored).  They take over 11 May. That is the feast of Pope St Alexander I in Rome (and St Francis of Jerome elsewhere, but elsewhere is expendable) so St Alexander has to be moved to 3 May, where he in turn displaces the Finding of the Holy Cross which can be merged with 14 September with the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross.

We talk about wreckovation of churches as a "fruit" of the Spirit of Vatican II: wreckovation of the calendar began a long time before.
.

1 comment:

Mike Cliffson said...

Yes...but I am utterly sure it made uncontestable sense in Italy AT THE TIME.
It is , rather , than despite making such obvious sense , that there shouldn't have have been in the church an ambiente of "What a great idea, what a pity we can't ".

After all , on the human level , that lampoil we have on board for the use of the Holy spirit, at trent, TRADITION was the only REASON given in the preamble for maintaining the vulgate, the (to my mind of themselves, utterly convincing, without any divine inspiration)technical arguments we have today being somewhat obscured by little matters such as the recent fall of bizantium, the attendant flood of looted and hence unprovenanced greek texts, a napoleonicly simple and erroneous method of deciding textual disagreement... all the clever bods had , for the day , far more convincing arguments agin....
tradition aint unguided by the holyspirit, exactly.