Almost fifty years out from the 1969 Roman Calendar reform seems a fitting distance to assess what works and what hasn’t. By and large, I think the Calendar reform has been correct and pastorally successful, but I would offer three changes.

First, I would jettison the periods of “Ordinary Time” and restore “Sundays after Epiphany” and “Sundays after Pentecost.” “Ordinary Time” may appeal to liturgical purists who recognize there are no propers for the weekdays of that period, which are usually taken from the previous Sunday if the celebrant does not use, for example, a saint’s proper or a votive Mass. Fine, but for the ordinary Catholic “ordinary time” means non-descript time and, honestly, that is what those weeks have largely become.

On the other hand, Epiphany and Pentecost are both major moments in salvation history and major feasts. Reconnecting the Sunday mysteries of those “ordinary times” with those moments provides a more integrated and coherent salvation history. Frankly, I think “Ordinary Time” has given us a fragmented and individualized approach to the seamless unity of Christ’s public ministry, something the former designation of “Sundays of” helped conceptually to pull together.

Modern culture already suffers from temporal ADHD; anticipation is fetishized, fulfillment is rushed, and memory is discarded. “Ordinary Time” baptizes this pathology. It mirrors the civil calendar in exhausting feasts before they arrive and forgetting them immediately afterward. Both our religious and secular cultures are fast losing a grip on extended celebration. As I observed with Christmas (seeing Christmas trees already discarded on December 27), the modern approach to time is too parcelized. To the extent it becomes extended, that happens in a front-loaded manner, i.e., we celebrate our “anticipation” of a feast more than its celebration. “Christmas” for the average American runs up to 12:01 a.m. December 26 (or, at best, gets an extension through New Year). Come January 2, the “holiday season” is over and we are into civil “ordinary time” again. I’m not sure our ecclesiastical “ordinary time” is much different, especially when the post-1969 “Christmastide” (sans “Sundays after Epiphany”) is shorter than Advent.

Second, I would restore the Pentecost Octave. I find no compelling reason for why the reformers discarded it. Octaves are essential to recovering the idea of extended celebration of a feast. Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas are the three most important feasts of the Church year. The Easter and Christmas octaves were preserved; there is no good reason Pentecost’s was not. (I am also willing to go back pre-1955 and talk about an Epiphany Octave.)

Again, I also feel a sense of time erosion around these feasts. The “fifty days” of Easter have been kept intact, but the “forty days” by which Ascension separated Easter from Pentecost have not. American liturgy-by-geography means the Solemnity of the Ascension has turned into another “pastoral” floater. In the process, it also undermines two other concepts of liturgical/devotional time: the notion of novena (whose primordial model was the interval from Ascension Thursday through Pentecost) and the idea that “waiting” in God’s time is not necessarily “pastorally” convenient for humans. Jesus commands His Apostles at the Ascension to remain in Jerusalem to wait for the coming of the Paraclete, who is sent by God in the fulness of His time, not in the truncated “time” our bishops have established for “pastoral” reasons. Likewise, the rapid denouement of Pentecost into “Ordinary Time” absent a Pentecost Octave sends a practical message: this feast isn’t too important.

What is important is worth prolonging its celebration. I’ve argued (see here) that our Christmas celebration is growing anemic, given confusion about the Octave Day, the civil loss of post-December 25 celebration, and “pastoral” adaptations that sometimes even remove January 1 from the holy day calendar despite being a civil holiday. That, together with the loss of venerable Christian customs (like the Carnival season, the prolongation of Christmas celebrations through Presentation, and the disappearance of post-Epiphany pastoral home visitations by clergy), further chips away at the Christmas season.

Third, I would restore the explicit penitential character of Advent. We already suffer theological cognitive dissonance when we celebrate the period in purple liturgical vestments but insist according to canon law that only Lent and Fridays (which, in America, de facto means only Lenten Fridays) are penitential days. The “joyful anticipation” motif of post-1969 Advent is incoherent. Christmas in the existential salvation dispensation in which we live and in which the Incarnation occurred was necessary because of sin. The failure to incorporate that penitential motif into today’s Advent is inconsistent with ecclesiastical practice and good theology, while offering no apparent countervailing justification for the practice. Again, it seems ecclesiastically to reinforce the cultural practice of front-loading “Christmas” into December (along with its premature cutoff) without countenancing the notion of Advent as a preparatory period for that season. After all, if we are not preparing by conversion, what kind of “preparation” are we doing?

I know that some traditionalists want to take a more radical axe to the 1969 Roman Calendar and can find some common ground with non-traditionalists who nevertheless might be receptive to some kind of “Septuagesima” restoration. I don’t go that far (though I think other penitential motifs could be renewed, e.g., ember days). But I think the three suggestions offered above fit comfortably within the overall perspectives of the Roman Calendar reform without necessarily requiring an endorsement of every change imposed in its name. (I also deliberately refrain from commenting on calendar adaptations in the United States, e.g., I would absolutely discard the USCCB’s various holy day hacks adopted as “Complementary Norms” over the years.) We’ve hopefully reached the point, especially with the new pontificate, where not every liturgical criticism is considered “reactionary” but can actually be acknowledged as honest.