7th Week Ordinary Time

[curlycool89]

Something’s been bothering me with the Liturgical calendar. What happened to the 7th week of ordinary time? The last week of ordinary time started February 14 (6th Sunday) and the next week of ordinary time starts after Pentecost (which is the 8th week of ordinary time).

Did the 7th week just get eaten up somewhere or something? Or do we always “skip a week” after the end of Easter?

 

[MarkThompson]

Something’s been bothering me with the Liturgical calendar. What happened to the 7th week of ordinary time? The last week of ordinary time started February 14 (6th Sunday) and the next week of ordinary time starts after Pentecost (which is the 8th week of ordinary time).

Did the 7th week just get eaten up somewhere or something? Or do we always “skip a week” after the end of Easter?

I believe a week is skipped after Easter unless the year has 53 Sundays. The lectionary has 34 “Ordinary Time weeks”, but some years will have only 33 weeks that do not fall in other liturgical seasons, so in those cases a week must be omitted. As explained in The Liturgical Year: Its History and Its Meaning After the Reform of the Liturgy by Adolf Adam, p. 160:

It is to be noted that if a given year has only 33 Sundays [of Ordinary Time], one week of Ordinary Time is omitted. If, for example, the week of Ash Wednesday is the 5th week, then the 7th week begins with the Monday after Pentecost. The purpose of this is to prevent the elimination of the 34th Sunday at the end of the liturgical year; its eschatological texts require that it be retained.

Hope this helps –

 

[curlycool89]

I believe a week is skipped after Easter unless the year has 53 Sundays. The lectionary has 34 “Ordinary Time weeks”, but some years will have only 33 weeks that do not fall in other liturgical seasons, so in those cases a week must be omitted. As explained in The Liturgical Year: Its History and Its Meaning After the Reform of the Liturgy by Adolf Adam, p. 160:

It is to be noted that if a given year has only 33 Sundays [of Ordinary Time], one week of Ordinary Time is omitted. If, for example, the week of Ash Wednesday is the 5th week, then the 7th week begins with the Monday after Pentecost. The purpose of this is to prevent the elimination of the 34th Sunday at the end of the liturgical year; its eschatological texts require that it be retained.

Hope this helps –

The last Sunday is always Christ the King though, is it not? Or I guess do we also need the 33rd, and/or the few before that too?

 

[MarkThompson]

The last Sunday is always Christ the King though, is it not? Or I guess do we also need the 33rd, and/or the few before that too?

Yes, the last Sunday is always the Solemnity of Christ the King, and the week between that and the first Sunday of Advent is the 34th week of Ordinary Time. I’m not sure whether raising that Sunday to a solemnity means it is not technically a Sunday of Ordinary Time (if so forgive my loose writing before), but it is not a Sunday of any other liturgical season, and there is definitely always a 34th week of Ordinary Time.

And we will always have the 33rd, 32nd, 31st, etc., Sundays. I haven’t done the exact math, but since the Sunday to be omitted in 52-Sunday years is the one after the Paschal season, I believe it must therefore be the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, or 9th.

 

[OraLabora]

Interesting little tidbit: the Dies Irae, formerly sung at funerals, is no longer part of the funeral rite. Instead, it has been split up, with doxologies added to each part, and now forms the hymn for the Office of Readings, Lauds and Vespers of the Liturgy of the Hours for the 34th week of OT.

 

[JMJ_coder]

Perhaps this paragraph from the GILOTH will shed some light on things:

1. From the Monday after the feast of the Baptism of the Lord until Lent and from the Monday after Pentecost until Advent there is a continuous series of thirty-four weeks in Ordinary Time.

This series is interrupted from Ash Wednesday until Pentecost. On the Monday after Pentecost Sunday the cycle of readings in Ordinary Time is resumed, beginning with the week after the one interrupted because of Lent; the reading assigned to the Sunday is omitted.

In years with only thirty-three weeks in Ordinary Time, the week immediately following Pentecost is dropped, in order to retain the readings of the last weeks which are eschatological readings…

 

[curlycool89]

Perhaps this paragraph from the GILOTH will shed some light on things:

1. From the Monday after the feast of the Baptism of the Lord until Lent and from the Monday after Pentecost until Advent there is a continuous series of thirty-four weeks in Ordinary Time.

This series is interrupted from Ash Wednesday until Pentecost. On the Monday after Pentecost Sunday the cycle of readings in Ordinary Time is resumed, beginning with the week after the one interrupted because of Lent; the reading assigned to the Sunday is omitted.

In years with only thirty-three weeks in Ordinary Time, the week immediately following Pentecost is dropped, in order to retain the readings of the last weeks which are eschatological readings…

Alrighty, that makes sense. It just seemed to me that a week was randomly dropped.