Candlemass 2023

 On February 2nd this year I went to a nearby Catholic church to take part in Mass for the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, or Candlemass. The liturgy was composed, I found, of a mixture of elements from the current rite of Mass and the pre-conciliar, or Tridentine, rite.

The Mass was celebrated in the evening, which was unthinkable before the reign of Pope Pius XII,

Before the recent liturgical reform, February 2 was known in the Roman Rite as the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin. Mass was preceded by the blessing and distribution of candles and a procession, which set off from the sanctuary and ended there. At one time, violet vestments were worn for these ceremonies, a relic of a pentiential procession that was held in Rome on this day in earlier times. The colour of the vestments offered a foretaste of Septuagesima and Lent. This custom was abandoned before Vatican II.

The ministers at the Mass I attended accepted these changes of name, schedule and vesture, wearing white throughout. But they rejected the change mandated after Vatican II, which requires the procession to begin from outside the sanctuary, preferably outside the Church building. It thus resembles the processions that begin the Masses of Palm Sunday and the Easter Vigil, being a procession to the altar, and so a reminiscence, even a reenactment, of the journey of the Holy Family to the Jerusalem Temple. Our procession began and ended at the altar, thus being reduced to a mere choral walk.

I was disappointed, not for the first time, to find clergy ignoring the laws that govern Catholic worship, and consequently failing to communicate to their flock in full the rich significance of our liturgy.