The Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, celebrated on January 1, the Octave of Christmas, is a holyday of obligation. There’s an argument to be made that its status is progressively being eroded.

Looking at some parish bulletins, I noticed a cutback in the number of Masses offered. That anecdotal perspective forces me to ask: How many parishes deviated from their “usual” holy day schedules (which normally should reproduce their Sunday schedules)? And, if your pastor deviated from that schedule in a more ample, fulsome way (i.e., he scheduled more Masses), please write in and tell us: we want to honor endangered species before they are utterly extinct!

I comment on the cutbacks in light of what I recently wrote on the creeping detachment of Christmas “midnight Mass” from midnight (here). I sense a trend: creeping Christmastide cutbacks.

My pastor, for example, scheduled Christmas Eve confessions, but my impression was he was in the clerical minority. Once upon a time — in my lifetime — having Christmas Eve confessions would not even have been up for debate.

Coming back to the Solemnity of the Mother of God, I fear this feast is slowly losing its due attention. In the United States, it is already subject to the USCCB’s inane “some-holy-days-on-Saturdays-or-Mondays-get-out-of-church-free” card: it ceases to be a holy day of obligation if it falls on a Saturday or Monday. (For more on this, see here.) Next year January 1 is a Friday, but the Solemnity falls off the holy day calendar in both 2028 and 2029 because it falls on Saturday and Monday, respectively. Because 2028 is a leap year, dates will skip one calendar day in 2029. Otherwise, January 1 would be a Sunday and not only remain a holy day but even preempt the Feast of the Holy Family. (Of course, after the yearlong COVID Mass shutdown, we apparently now are accustomed to broad indulgence of the notion that the “obligation” of participating in Mass on Sundays and holy days seems mostly a canonical discipline imposed by bishops rather than a moral and theological duty imposed by God. See also: bishops waiving Christmastide-wide Mass obligations in the name of “fear” of lawful immigration control.)

I have long argued that the “Saturday/Monday rule” makes no sense except as an exercise in raw canonical power. It especially makes no sense on January 1. One might argue, out of misguided “pastoral” excuse making, that All Saints or the Assumption are not civil holidays and so people are “burdened” by “too much” church attendance. But January 1 is a civil holiday almost everybody has off. The application of the “now-it’s-a-holy-day-now-it’s-not” rule only serves to marginalize the feast and reinforce its civil meaning over its religious one.

Because that is the other problem here: People don’t understand why this is a holy day. Why has the Church “stuck” some “Marian” feast on January 1? What’s so important about the maternity of Mary, especially after a night of Auld Lang Syne? Our ecclesiastical practice does not make clear that this feast was in place on January 1 long before January 1 was the civil new year. And the fact that some Catholics don’t get the nexus of this feast on the octave day of Christmas, after singing “round yon’ virgin, mother and child” for the past month-plus, also says something.

We also need to recover an extended sense of time. “Christmas” did not end at 12:01 a.m. December 26. January 1 is the octave day of Christmas. Does “octave” mean anything in a world thoroughly locked into only the concrete present moment? Do we actually know how to “celebrate” as opposed to “anticipating” (“checking off”) a “celebration?” Isn’t that important, especially in our currently truncated liturgical “Christmas Season” (which ends January 11) where already the other major Christmas feast — the Epiphany — is unmoored (for “pastoral” reasons) from its long traditional twelfth night position?

Perhaps the Church also needs liturgically to countenance the opening of the civil new year on this day. Perhaps we need to take account of the accretions that have overlaid this day. For a long time, we treated it as the “Circumcision” (whose significance was equally unclear to the average Catholic). Then Pope Paul VI overlaid it with a “World Day of Peace” (has there ever been one yet where it could be celebrated consistent with the Roman Martyrology’s proclamation of Jesus’ birth of “the whole world being at peace”?).

And perhaps the Church also needs to stop conceding the day to its civil celebration. I’ve long argued that parishes should consider their own “new year’s eve celebrations.” They can be liturgical. A later evening anticipated Mass. Why not have a New Year Midnight Mass? It’s why I worry about what’s happening to Christmas Midnight Mass: Unlike our “pastoral” types, the civil world does not “anticipate” the ball drop at 5 or 9 p.m. on December 31 and people don’t feel “burdened” staying up. If not a Mass, what about a Holy Hour over the last half hour of the old and first half hour of the new year, a known traditional practice?

The celebration could also be liturgical and celebratory; they are not mutually exclusive. Why shouldn’t the parish be a locus of celebration? Most of them have already declared themselves on paper a “community.” Maybe they can actually act like one? The “celebration” can be anything from a New Year’s Eve party beginning or ending with Mass to a simple friendly reception, not unlike “donut Sundays,” after a later/midnight Mass. To all those liturgists and priests complaining the faithful treat parishes as “spiritual service stations” accessed based on Mass convenience: well, start acting like more than the neighborhood spiritual franchise. (I absolutely agree with my first grad school mentor, Fr. Sabbas Kilian: our theology of parish is incoherent.)

We need to recover the catechesis of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, because the deep theology of this feast also speaks to contemporary issues (like surrogacy and in vitro fertilization) that parcel personal motherhood as divine gift into technical functions of genetics, gestation, and child-rearing. We need to flesh out for our own human theological anthropology the significance of Mary as “Mother of God” in a society blind to the relationship of nature and person. We need to see its nexus to the Nativity of Jesus Christ.

And we need to recover a sense of gratitude, both for these mysteries and for our place in history: the blessings received in the year gone by, those needed for the year arriving. The place this happens is the Church. It does not happen if we continue to erode this Solemnity. The excuses for why we are doing this are utterly incommensurate with the treasures lost.