Holy days of obligation stand as one of the more obvious examples, in ordinary Catholic experience, of the difference between doctrine and discipline.
Doctrine may develop, unfold, or even be clarified in new ways, but it does not fundamentally change, tied as it is to the deposit of faith and the apostolic tradition. Discipline, though it requires our assent and cooperation, can and does change based on everything from practical concerns and pastoral need to local culture. Although holy days of obligation, or days “of precept” according to canon law, are . . . well, obligatory, the Magisterium has never claimed that this is a matter of divine or natural law.
That doesn’t mean that calendar changes are incapable of causing scandal or confusion among the faithful. Take Ascension Day as a prime example. Since the 1983 Code of Canon Law (CIC), bishops’ conferences have been permitted, with the approval of the Holy See, to direct the observance of weekday holy days to Sunday. This permission is different from an older practice of observing an “external solemnity”—repeating a weekday feast on the following Sunday for the benefit of the faithful—in that the canon simply allows the feast to be transferred. So, since at least 1999, most ecclesiastical provinces of the United States have moved Ascension Day to the Seventh Sunday of Easter.
So depending on where you go, today will either be Ascension Day or simply Thursday in the sixth week of Easter. For some Catholics, especially in the Northeast, in Nebraska, and in the Ordinariate, today is a holy day of obligation. For everyone else in the country, it isn’t.
There are two main aspects of this conundrum worth noting. First is the observance of holy days in general. Second is the transfer of holy days to Sunday.
On the first point, we should observe that the CIC for the Latin Church establishes ten days “of precept” in addition to all the Sundays of the year. In the United States, we have only six. (The Epiphany, Corpus Christi, St. Joseph, and Ss. Peter and Paul are left out). In Canada, there are only two (Christmas and Mary, Mother of God). Hawaii, interestingly, has permission to follow the Conference of the Pacific in obligating only Christmas and the Immaculate Conception.
The number of obligatory holy days, however, intertwines with the practice of transferal in that certain feast days that are formally excluded from the list are included by virtue of being moved to a Sunday: in our case, the Epiphany and Corpus Christi. (Side note: Various other feasts can also become obligatory by falling on a Sunday. For example, Candlemas, or the Presentation, is not usually a day of precept, but if February 2 falls on a Sunday, it outranks a Sunday in Ordinary Time and becomes, effectively, a solemnity of precept.)
Why, after many centuries of calendar stability, did the bishops decide to start moving major feasts days like the Epiphany, the Ascension, and Corpus Christi to Sunday? Most public explanations since the 1980s focus on that great favorite concept of the modern Church: “pastoral reasons.” But the actual practice is confusing and contradictory.
Take Canada, for example, where the Conference seems to think that making Catholics go to church on a non-Sunday is so burdensome that it can be done only a couple of times a year. But then if it is so very burdensome, it is not clear why the two holy days for the whole year have to be crammed into a single moment between December 25 and January 1—and, unlike in the U.S., the feast occurring on a Saturday or Monday doesn’t change the obligation.
The Epiphany now “is” the Sunday between January 2 and 8 in the United States, despite centuries of Catholic culture associating it with January 6 and despite the tradition of the twelve days of Christmas, Twelfth Night, Three Kings’ Day, etc. It is not entirely clear why it is burdensome to ask Catholics to go to Mass on January 6 but not burdensome for them to go to Mass on December 8.
One can be sympathetic with the removal of a burden—that is, making the feast day non-obligatory. After all, failing to attend Mass on a day of precept constitutes a grave sin if it is done consciously. I appreciate the pastoral desire to remove unnecessary obstacles to Catholics remaining in a state of grace! Indeed, Ash Wednesday is perhaps the most obvious proof that a day does not need to be obligatory to be popular or well attended.
But it is, I submit, a rather different thing to declare that, since the faithful are unlikely (or unable, or unwilling) to attend Mass during the week, we must therefore fiddle with the calendar in a way that throws centuries of Catholic devotional and popular culture out the window. In fact, it’s not just “traditional” culture that gets lost. Take Ascension Day, which in most places replaces the Seventh Sunday of Easter. The framers of the new lectionary for the 1970 Missal gave us the same gospel reading from John for all three years on that Sunday; clearly, they thought the faithful ought to hear Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John 17 that we all be one as he and the Father are one. But most Catholics never hear that reading at Mass because it is replaced by the Mass for the Ascension. Similarly, the removal of the Epiphany from January 6 to Sunday usually causes us to miss the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord—or rather, it gets moved to a weekday, where it is usually forgotten. And by the way, St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, hardly what we would call “rigid” these days on liturgical matters, has continued to keep all of these feasts on their proper dates.
I do not doubt the authority of the bishops, or of the Holy See, to approve these calendar adaptations. You’re not going to see me rebelliously purporting to celebrate Corpus Christi on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. Still, I think it’s high time we recognize that the “pastoral” tinkering with the calendar in recent decades has served only to further dilute the experience of a common Catholic culture. A more robust observance of the calendar doesn’t have to be hard (or even obligatory). I think the more “pastoral” solution would be for the bishops to allow the faithful to receive the gift of the calendar as the Church has handed it down.