Pastor's Corner: Importance and History of the Septuagesima Season
Importance and history of the Septuagesima season
2nd Sunday of February:
Quinquagesima Sunday
We provide here an excerpt from Dom Gueranger's work The Liturgical Year on the importance and historical development of the season of Septuagesima in the yearly liturgical cycle of the Latin Church.
The season of Septuagesima comprises the three weeks immediately preceding Lent. It forms one of the principal divisions of the Liturgical Year, and is itself divided into three parts, each part corresponding to a week: the first is called Septuagesima; the second, Sexagesima; the third, Quinquagesima.
All three are named from their numerical reference to Lent, which, in the language of the Church, is called Quadragesima, - that is, 40, - because the great feast of Easter is prepared for by the holy exercises of 40 days. The words Quinquagesima, Sexagesima, and Septuagesima, tell us of the same great solemnity as looming in the distance, and as being the great object towards which the Church would have us now begin to turn all our thoughts, and desires, and devotion.
Now, the feast of Easter must be prepared for by a recollection and penance of 40 days. Those 40 days are one of the principal seasons of the Liturgical Year, and one of the most powerful means employed by the Church for exciting in the hearts of her children the spirit of their Christian vocation.
It is of the utmost importance, that such a season of penance should produce its work in our souls the renovation of the whole spiritual life. The Church, therefore, has instituted a preparation through the holy time of Lent. She gives us the three weeks of Septuagesima, during which she withdraws us, as much as may be, from the noisy distractions of the world, in order that our hearts may be the more readily impressed by the solemn warning she is to give us - which at the commencement of Lent is done by marking our foreheads with ashes.
This prelude to the holy season of Lent was not known in the early ages of Christianity: its institution would seem to have originated in the Greek Church... [Per their reckoning] …To make up the deficiency, they [Greeks] were obliged to begin their Lent so many days earlier, as we will show in our next volume.
The Church of Rome had no such motive for anticipating the season of those privations, which belong to Lent; for, from the earliest antiquity, she kept the Saturdays of Lent, (and as often, during the rest of the year, as circumstances might require,) as fasting days. At the close of the 6th century, St. Gregory the Great, alludes, in one of his homilies, to the fast of Lent being less than 40 days, owing to the Sundays which come during that holy season.
There are from this day (the first Sunday of Lent) to the joyous Feast of Easter, six weeks, that is, 42 days. As we do not fast on the 6 Sundays, there are but 36 fasting days; which we offer to God as the “tithe of our year.”
It was, therefore, after the pontificate of St. Gregory, that the last four days of Quinquagesima Week, were added to Lent, in order that the number of fasting days might be exactly 40.
As early, however, as the 9th century, the custom of beginning Lent on Ash Wednesday was of obligation in the whole Latin Church. All the manuscript copies of the Gregorian Sacramentary, which bear that date, call this Wednesday the In capite jejunii, that is to say, the beginning of the fast; and Amalarius gives us every detail of the liturgy of the 9th century, tells us, that it was, even then, the rule to begin the fast four days before the first Sunday of Lent. We find the practice confirmed by two Councils, held in that century [Meaux, and Soissons].
But, out of respect for the form of Divine Service drawn up by St. Gregory, the Church does not make any important change in the Office of these four days. Up to the Vespers of Saturday, when alone she begins the Lenten rite, she observes the rubrics prescribed for Quinquagesima Week.
(…)
Thus it was, that the Roman Church, by this anticipation of Lent by four days, gave the exact number of 40 days to the holy season, which she had instituted in imitation of the 40 Days spent by our Savior in the desert. While faithful to her ancient practice of looking on the Saturday as a day appropriate for penitential exercises, she gladly borrowed from the Greek Church the custom of preparing for Lent, by giving to the liturgy of the three preceding weeks a tone of holy mournfulness.
Even as early as the beginning of the 9th century, as we learn from Amalarius, the Alleluia and Gloria in excelsis were suspended in the Septuagesima Offices... Finally, in the second half of the 11th century, Pope Alexander II enacted that the total suspension of the Alleluia should be everywhere observed [in the Roman Church], beginning with the Vespers of the Saturday preceding Septuagesima Sunday. This Pope was but renewing a rule already sanctioned, in that same century, by Pope Leo the Ninth, and which was inserted in the body of Canon Law [Cap. Hi duo. De consec. Dist. 1].
Thus was the present important period of the Liturgical Year, after various changes, established the Cycle of the Church. It has been there upward of a thousand years. Its name, Septuagesima (70 days), expresses, as we have already remarked, a numerical relation to Quadragesima (40 days); although, in reality, there are not seventy but only sixty-three days from Septuagesima Sunday to Easter.
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