St Anne standing behind her daughter Mary who holds Baby Jesus. The 15th-century carving is in the cathedral museum at Santiago de Compostela.
The Immaculate Conception on 8 December is when we recall the conception of the Virgin Mary by her parents Anne and Joachim.
Immaculate refers to their daughter being born free from sin in preparation for her destiny as Mother of Jesus.
This afternoon the Pope would normally place white roses at the base of the Column of the Immaculate Conception near the Spanish Steps. The popular occasion with the singing of a litany has now been cancelled due to the pandemic.
Last year the Pope went without public announcement very early in the morning.
The statue of Our Lady high above is usually holding a floral wreath already placed on her arm by the Rome Fire Service.
But the traditional candle procession in Lyon will take place tonight.
Because 8 December is Mary’s conception we mark her birthday nine moths later on 8 September.
‘St Nicholas’ will arrive at Canterbury Cathedral on Sunday, the eve of St Nicholas Day.
The St Nicholas Family Service is at 5.30pm when there will be a chance to find out more about the original Father Christmas before St Nic appears.
Music is being provided by children’s choirs and bands and the Canterbury Cathedral Girl Choristers will also sing.
***Keeping Advent & Christmas (£9.99), with more about St Nicholas about the main days of the season, is available from DLT at 40% off using offer code xmas21.
Reliquary containing St Andrew’s arm in the Dominican church of St Andreas in Cologne
The last day of November is special in Scotland because it is St Andrew’s Day.
But St Andrew, brother of St Peter, is also patron of Greece, Poland, Romania and Russia.
Andrew was martyred today in Greece by being crucified upside down on an X shaped cross which is recalled by the St Andrew cross.
Relics are held on the site in Patras and also in Amalfi, Italy. Both towns hold an outdoor procession.
St Andrew’s Day has great resonance in Barbados where the day is a holiday and the cross of St Andrew appears in the country’s heraldry. It is independence day and the Commonwealth country has chosen 30 November this year to become a republic.
The Saxon church at Greensted-Juxta-Ongar in Essex, the world’s oldest wooden building, is dedicated to St Andrew.
***Keeping Advent & Christmas (£9.99), with details about the main days, is available from DLT at 40% off using offer code xmas21.
The pandemic has made a lot of people lose a sense of time and season.
The virus has also caused a huge loss of income for shops resulting in the earliest ever display of Christmas decorations in shopping malls and an unseasonal appearance of Father Christmas.
If you celebrate early what happens when the real event arrives? It will be a disappointment and so lose all resonance and excitement.
The answer is join the Slow Christmas movement now.
This weekend is the start of Advent which heralds Christmas. Saturday, being the eve of Advent Sunday, will see Advent carol services in Winchester and other cathedrals. Candles will be carried in procession as they will again at the very end of the Christmas season at Candlemas on 2 February and at the Easter Vigil.
It is four weeks until we reach Christmas and as we wait for the feast there is much to enjoy and reflect on: St Andrew’s Day, St Nicholas Day (the real Father Christmas), the Conception of Mary, Our Lady of Loreto with its wonderful angel iconography, St Lucy with her flaming crown and the O Antiphons.
A legacy of the pandemic is the range of live coverage of church services. You can join Winchester Cathedral’s Advent Procession carol service online here at 6.30pm on Saturday.
***Keeping Advent & Christmas (£9.99), with details about the main days, is available from DLT at 40% off using offer code xmas21.
The ancient Holy Week service of Tenebrae is now often held on Wednesday and this year there are opportunities to be present online.
‘This arduous service has mystical beauty,’ observed art historian Brian Sewell who described it as ‘the most disturbing and convincing service’, which was also ‘poetic, theatrical and terrible’.
The responses in this service, which developed between the 8th and early 12th century, are sometimes described as ‘ethereal’.
The name Tenebrae comes from the Latin word for darkness or shadows. It is a combination of monastic matins and lauds for Maundy Thursday sung in anticipation.
The focus of the two hour service is a triangular candle stand known as a hearse which is placed before the altar. Hearse is corruption of harrow suggested by the spikes for the candles.
There are normally 15 candles –7 on each sloping side representing Mary Magdalene, Mary wife of Cleophas and the twelve Apostles whilst on top there is a white candle for Christ. This white candle was first seen at York in the 11th century.
The number of lights has varied with the Sarum Rite (Salisbury) prescribing 24.
The candles, which can be unbleached as at a funeral, are extinguished one by one as each psalm ends recalling a deepening gloom as Christ is abandoned by his followers.
Near the beginning is the singing of the Lamentations in the form of three lessons from the Old Testament’s First Lamentation of Jeremiah (Lamentations 1:1-14).
The sad haunting chant forms part of the Jewish liturgy which would have been heard by Christ.
Near the end of the service there is the Song of Moses which will be heard again on Saturday after the Easter Vigil’s third reading.
During the Benedictus the other lights in church are put out leaving only the white candle at the top of the triangle burning. This light is then hidden behind the altar whilst Psalm 51, usually Allegri’s Miserere, is sung.
Soon after a loud noise is made off-stage like a clap of thunder. This is the Great Noise said to represent confusion, the crowd seeking Christ’ arrest at Gethsemane or an earthquake at Christ’s death or resurrection.
However it is not over as the hidden light is brought back to the pinnacle of the triangle. This represents Christ overcoming death on Easter morning.
St Paul’s Covent Garden is well-known for Tenebrae on Wednesday evening. This year there will be a recording online at 7.30pm.
Life-size image of Christ on a donkey has been part of Palm Sunday processions in Germany
‘Holy Week … is the peculiar privilege of Christians and should be their delight, their share in the sacred act of theatre, their most important week of all the year,’ wrote Observer journalist Patrick O’Donovan.
Holy Week, which begins tonight with Christ arriving at Bethany, enables us to live with Christ his final week on earth.
We can enter Jerusalem with Christ (Palm Sunday procession), be present at the Last Supper (Maundy Thursday evening Mass), kneel in the garden of Gethsemane (Thursday evening watch), walk with Christ as He carries the Cross and then watch at the foot of the Cross (Three Hours Service on Good Friday) and rejoice at his rising from the dead very early on Easter morning (Easter Vigil).
It is a week- long pilgrimage not of re-enactment but liturgical participation in Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection.
This year we can follow much of the liturgy on the internet with useful service sheets available here.
But at home we can also delve into the events of week by reading the accounts in the Bible.
On which day did Jesus overturn the tables in The Temple? Was it on his arrival on Palm Sunday when he had been given such a warm welcome or was it on Monday morning?
Also, the incident with the ointment, if not Saturday night, then maybe this happened on Tuesday or Wednesday night.
With lockdown and restricted entry to many churches this will be a different Holy Week but it could, using our rare time to read, be a deeper and rewarding one.
Mary’s house being carried by angels from Nazareth to Loreto
Today Thursday 25 March is a bright pause in Lent to look ahead nine months to Christmas.
If Christmas is on 25 December so 25 March must be the Annunciation. On this day we recall the Virgin Mary being visited in her Nazareth home by an angel and informed that she would give birth to a son to be called Jesus.
Whilst confined to our home we can think of the modern basilica in Nazareth which covers the site of Mary’s home or Loreto in Italy where the front of the house is now preserved within another church.
Another focus today can be the custom now established in Lebanon and France where Christians and Muslims meet together on The Annunciation to honour Mary and strengthen friendship.
Next week we shall think of Mary at the foot of the Cross.
Lilies in Southwark Cathedral for The Annunciation. Mary’s lily features on the cathedral’s ancient shield.
Mosaic of St. Joseph in the Church of the Holy Family in Linz, Austria.
Today Friday 19 March is St Joseph’s Day and we are remembering him in this year of St Joseph marking the 150th anniversary of Pope Pius IX declaring St Joseph as Patron of the Universal Church.
He is also patron of workers, including carpenters, and fathers.
We know Joseph as Jesus’s step father who accepted Mary his wife being the mother of Jesus.
Next week on Thursday 25 March, The Annunciation, we shall recall the moment Mary accepted her role.
Today is Father’s Day in Italy, Spain and Portugal.
Pope Francis offers this prayer to St Joseph:
Blessed Joseph, to us too, show yourself a father and guide us in the path of life. Obtain for us grace, mercy, and courage, and defend us from every evil. Amen.
Hail, Guardian of the Redeemer, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary. To you God entrusted his only Son; in you Mary placed her trust; with you Christ became man.
Mothering Sunday, 14 March this year, is about both remembering our mothers and acknowledging our Mother Church.
This is why in normal times at some parish churches the congregation marks Mothering Sunday by going outside, joining hands and surrounding the building.
They hug their church.
But the church is also the people. So although many of us are this year stuck at home and unable to go into our own church building we can still, as the living never closed church, keep the calendar.
On Mothering Sunday it is an old tradition to have a simnel cake.
Next Sunday 21 March is Passion Sunday and if you are in the north-east you might still keep the tradition of eating carlin peas for Sunday lunch. Try having some sent by post
In almost two weeks time we shall be approaching Palm Sunday when we can with Christ go up to Jerusalem in real time for Holy Week.
Buy some figs, dried figs or fig biscuits to eat on Holy Week’s Fig Monday 29 March just as we can have Hot Cross Buns on Good Friday.
Some customs can be maintained now and as we begin to follow Jesus’s movements day by day towards Good Friday and Easter.
Carlin peas for lunch on Passion Sunday in Northumberland
