The Failings of a Sunday Epiphany

Everybody knows the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas," and most everybody also knows that after the 12th day there follows the Epiphany, the visit of the Magi to the newborn baby Jesus in Bethlehem. Simple math makes the 12th day after Christmas the 5th of January and Epiphany, therefore, the 6th. So why is it that we will be commemorating the Epiphany tomorrow, Sunday, Jan. 8?

Liturgical rebels, the whole lot of us: Here we illicitly commemorate the Epiphany with compline the night of Jan. 6.

The short answer is that after the Second Vatican Council the U.S. bishops decided to transfer the Epiphany from Jan. 6 to the Sunday falling between Jan. 2-8. It's a change that local bishops' conferences are permitted to make, and one that our own bishops have also made with respect to the Solemnities of the Ascension and Corpus Christi, both of which feasts we commemorate the Sunday after their traditional Thursday dates.

Although that's the answer in one way, it leaves the question unanswered in another: Why were the bishops so keen to move the feasts in the first place? After all, it puts us out of sync with the rest of Christianity, including the Vatican itself, where Pope Francis celebrated the Epiphany on Friday. Yes, I'm aware that the Orthodox, using the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian, celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7, and Epiphany on Jan. 19, but at least in the West the date of Epiphany has been the 6th for many centuries. For its part, the Ascension is necessarily on the Thursday of the sixth week of Easter, because Christ ascended into heaven 40 days after His resurrection. So, why move these feasts? Why make things so complicated and ahistorical?

The most charitable answer I can think of is that the bishops feel that our secular culture does not permit us to commemorate these feasts properly during the work week. Yes, the culture begrudges us Christmas day, even as it coopts Christmas it for its own secular purposes, but Epiphany is one disruption too many. Mary, Mother of God, the Ascension, Corpus Christi, the Assumption, All Saints, the Immaculate Conception--these holy days of obligation would multiply the disruption exponentially.

Charitable answer aside, I think the bishops are dead wrong. Look around you in the pews tomorrow at Mass. People may be filling the pews at the same rate as they would any other Sunday, but I'll bet that if you started asking them, less than half came to church even aware that it was the Epiphany. I'll bet that less than a quarter of them have any plans to mark the feast other than spend a little time with family, something that they would have done on Sunday anyway. In short, therefore, the bishops have taken away the Epiphany, the Ascension, and Corpus Christi, and replaced these important feastdays with... nothing.

Whatever good intentions the bishops may have had, the experiment of transferring obligatory feasts to Sunday (or of eliminating the obligation altogether in the case of Mary, Mother of God, the Assumption, and All Saints, when they happen to fall on Saturdays or Mondays), has been an utter failure. The same can be said of the U.S. bishops' elimination of obligatory Friday abstinence from meat outside of Lent. Has this truly led to an increase in works of penance and charity? I was shocked, earlier this year, when I mentioned in class that Catholics are obliged to make a sacrifice of some kind if they choose to eat meat on Fridays, only to be met by a roomful of blank stares. Not a single student at the faithful Catholic school where I teach had ever heard of this before.

The blogger Fr. Zuhlsdorf has written about the tendency since the Second Vatican Council to soften requirements, to make things easier, as a subtle form of clericalism. Is it any wonder, if our pastors feel that we're incapable of making it to church for a holy day of obligation during the week, or that we can't refrain from eating meat one day a week, that now we're discussing whether it's too much to expect Catholics who have contracted second marriages without obtaining an annulment to live as brother and sister? These matters are not wholly unconnected.

I'm just an ordinary lay Catholic appealing to bishops, priests, pastors: Please, do not water down the faith for us. We need you to share Christ's teachings with us whole and entire as you minister to us in His name and, sacramentally, in His very person.

A few years ago the bishops of England and Wales finally came to their senses, at least with respect to Friday abstinence, making it obligatory again for Catholics in their jurisdiction. Comments from New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan hint that our own bishops are also considering reinstituting obligatory, year-round abstinence from meat. Although I doubt that the issue of transferred feastdays is on the agenda at this point, it really should be.

A blessed Feast of the Epiphany to you all, in any case, whenever you celebrate it!