St John the Evangelist RC Church Tadworth

For the first 3 centuries of Christianity the only feast observed throughout the church was the feast of the Easter Vigil.  Certainly the very first Christians celebrated the Last Supper every first day of the week, on our Sunday.  This was the tradition that they received from Jesus and they passed his tradition on. The Last Supper is of course a celebration of the Paschal Mystery, the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus and a proclamation of our hope that Jesus will return. And from that first Eucharist onward the Church has never failed to come together to celebrate the Paschal Mystery especially in its ‘little Easters’, every Sunday Mass. However, the Easter season was particularly celebrated not only because it was central to Christian belief but also because the early Christians believed that the Risen Lord would return at any moment at Easter and so they needed to be present and waiting.  They called his imminent coming the parousia.

CANA

Don’t be misled by this Article’s title. It is not about the Wedding Feast at which Jesus turned water into wine, nor about the cure of the court official’s son. It is about an organisation called ‘Christians Awakening to a New Awareness’ or CANA for short.

Lent is mentioned in Canon 5 of the Council of Nicaea (AD325), not as an innovation but as the extended fast before Easter and also as a period of preparation for baptism.   In English our word Lent comes from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning Spring for lencten refers to the lengthening of days.  However, in Latin Lent is called tempus quadragesimae, the forty-day period of time.   The significance of 40 days has been described as symbolic of the journey of the Israelites in the desert, or the time Moses spent on Sinai, or the days of fasting Jesus spent in the desert before he began his ministry.  Different traditions have different ways of calculating the 40 days.  Some traditions exclude Sunday, some Saturday and Sunday; sometimes they exclude Good Friday and Holy Saturday or sometimes the whole of Holy Week.  Generally the Western tradition is to count 40 days from Ash Wednesday and include Holy Week but not Sundays.

This Article covers three quite distinct topics:

(1) The proposed new English version of the Mass following a recent revision of the Latin text;

(2) Comments on the Diaconate in the light of the Holy Father’s recent motu proprio;