Feasts

In his book on Dogma and Preaching, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger reflected on the value of Christian festivity: “A Christian feast . . . means that the human person leaves the world of calculation and determinisms in which everyday life snares him, and that he focuses his being on the primal source of his existence. It means that for the moment he is freed from the stern logic of the struggle for existence and looks beyond his own narrow world to the totality of things. It means that he allows himself to be comforted, allows his conscience to be moved by the love he finds in the God who has become a child, and that in doing so he becomes freer, richer, purer. If we were to try celebrating in this fashion, would not a sigh of relief pass across the world? Would such a feast not bring hope to the oppressed and be a clarion call to the forgetful folk who are aware only of themselves?”

For Ratzinger, feasts are joyful occasions, but in this world joy is only possible “if there is an answer to death” (The Feast of Faith): “The feast presupposes joy, but this is only possible if it is able to face up to death. . . .[T]he feast . . . attempts to answer the question of death by establishing a connection with the universal vital power of the cosmos. . . . The freedom with which we are concerned in the Christian feast—the feast of the Eucharist—is the liberation of the world and ourselves from death. Only this can make us free, enabling us to accept truth and to love one another in truth.”

These two quotations provide orientation for Cardinal Donald Wuerl and Mike Aquilina’s forthcoming The Feasts. The authors are Catholics writing for Catholics in an effort to explain how the Christian calendar forms the believer and the church. They begin with a biblically-rich theology of feasting and calendar, briefly trace the history of the Christian calendar, before settling into a series of brief chapters on Catholic solemnities, as well as a number of lesser observances. They describe the significance of each event being celebrated, as well as various liturgical practices associated with the feast. The authors make it clear that the “calendar is a catechism,” and show how the celebrations not only commemorate a past event but share life in the present and lend hope for the future.

It is a Catholic book, including a lengthy catalog of the feast days for Mary and the saints. But the basic theology of festivity, and the descriptions of particular feasts, are universally Christian.