Ascension in Rome and England

Ascension Day is being celebrated in Vatican City today (1st May) but in the rest of Rome and Italy it is St. Joseph the Worker (and a public holiday because of Mayday) - the Ascension will be celebrated on Sunday. The debate in England over Extraordinary Form masses needing to conform to the English bishops' decision to transfer Holy Days of Obligation to Sundays has received sturdy criticism on the Holy Smoke blog site.

The decision in the first place to transfer Holy Days to Sundays was a legitimate one according to current Church law, though disappointing. It sends out a message to the secular world that religion is something reserved for Sundays and nothing to do with normal life - it looks like an optional extra for those who feel like doing something different when relaxing on their day off. However, the decision to transfer them has been made and there is very little practising Catholics can do about it except pray that it might change.

Whether it was pastorally sensitive to seek clarification more recently on these celebrations according to the Extraordinary Form is another matter. Since there is already a substantial difference between the calendars for the two Forms, it might have seemed prudent to have ignored it. As I pointed out in a post to Holy Smoke, attending two celebrations of the same feast on different days because of the discrepancies in the calendars is not uncommon if you do not exclusively attend either the Extraordinary Form or the Ordinary. No moves currently seem to be being made by the Vatican to address this problem by reforming both calendars to bring them in line with each other, so the practice of this double celebration cannot be viewed as being too serious, as indeed is evidenced by the ongoing duality in Rome itself.

The question needs to be asked what the motivation was for raising the dubium in the first place. Was it out of pastoral care for the faithful or was it more of a "political" move? Since a duality exists already in the celebrations according to the two Forms it seems reasonable to leave it to the faithful to choose which celebration in which Form to attend.

The whole debate demonstrates just how poor we are at loving each other in practice. The Liturgy should inspire us in love, to love: it should not be a source of contention. "In the Church's Liturgy, in her prayer, in the living community of believers, we experience the love of God, we perceive his presence and we thus learn to recognize that presence in our daily lives. He has loved us first and he continues to do so; we too, then, can respond with love. God does not demand of us a feeling which we ourselves are incapable of producing. He loves us, he makes us see and experience his love, and since he has “loved us first”, love can also blossom as a response within us." [Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 17.]