Vatican walks back Mass obligation guidance
A Vatican directive on holy days of obligation has seemingly been rescinded.
The prefect of the Vatican’s worship office said this week that when days holy days of obligation are transferred on the Church’s liturgical calendar because of conflict with another feast day, the ensuing obligation to go to Mass does not transfer to the new date.
The announcement would seem to override a 2024 Vatican letter that created a fracas over an obligation to attend Mass when the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception was moved to a Monday because of its conflict with an Advent Sunday.
“The coexistence, in the liturgical year, of the weekly cycle of movable feasts and weekdays and of days with fixed date celebrations, both in the the universal and particular calendars, gives rise to the phenomenon of occurrentia festorum, ie., the coincidence of two feast days on the same calendar date,” wrote Cardinal Arthur Roche, prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, in a Jan. 23 notification.
Roche explained that when feasts coincide, the “one that holds the highest rank according to the Table of Liturgical Days is observed,” with a lesser solemnity moved to the next available day.
But while the Vatican said otherwise late last year, Roche said that moving a feast would not make the new date of its observation a day of canonical precept.
“In the event of the occasional transfer of a holyday of obligation, the obligation to attend Mass is not transferred to the [new] day,” he wrote.
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The cardinal’s note came after a legal clarification from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Legislative Texts last September.
In a letter to Bishop Thomas Paprocki, chair of the USCCB’s canonical affairs committee, the dicastery explained that the Immaculate Conception, along with several other feasts, “are always days of obligation… even when the … transfer of the feast occurs.”
“The feast must be observed as a day of obligation on the day to which it is transferred,” the Vatican stated.
That clarification meant that the USCCB had seemingly been interpreting canon law incorrectly — possibly because the bishops’ conference had abrogated the obligation to attend Mass when certain feast days happened to fall on Saturdays or Mondays — but not including the Immaculate Conception.
The notification meant that the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception last year would be a day of obligation observed on December 9 rather than the customary December 8, which was an Advent Sunday, which takes precedence according to the Church’s liturgical rubrics.
The September Vatican announcement took U.S. dioceses by surprise, and many bishops dispensed their own local Catholics from observing an unexpected day of precept that December.
The next time December 8 will fall on a Sunday, and see the solemnity moved to Dec. 9, is 2030. On that day, according to Roche’s announcement, the Immaculate Conception will not be a Holy Day of Obligation.
That is because, Roche wrote, his dicastery has not previously interpreted canon law on the subject in the same way as the Dicastery for Legislative Text.
The Dicastery for Divine Worship has a “well-established practice according to which, in the event of a transfer of a holy day of obligation, the obligation to attend Mass is not transferred.”
While the legislative texts dicastery has a responsibility for providing interpretations to canon law, Roche’s intervention seems intended to instruct bishops and episcopal conferences to ignore the letter it sent USCCB officials last year.
The letter did not address the situation in countries on which the Immaculate Conception was celebrated in place of an Advent Sunday, among them Italy itself, in seeming contravention of the current calendar rubrics.
This is a problem of the current curial offices not following the traditional practice of dicasteries letting other dicasteries review their documents when competence overlaps or is related. Such confusions are avoided when this is done.
Not trying to open a can of worms here, but this is an area where the new calendar / ordo would be enriched by taking a page out of the leaf of the older missals (a la Summorum Pontificum) and allow for commemorations where these coincidences occur.