“A new season has dawned, dark and foreboding.”

Image: Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, Benjamin West, Wiki Commons CC. This is an expanded and updated version of an article originally published at LifeSiteNews in February 2023

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The Roman Liturgy
Septuagesima – The Beginning of the Liturgical Year?

“The terrors of death surged round me, the cords of the nether world enmeshed me. In my distress I called upon the Lord; from His holy temple He heard my voice.”[1]

These are the dramatic and foreboding words from the Introit which open the season of Septuagesima.

But what is this new season of the Church’s year, so unfamiliar to many today?

In its most basic reality, Septuagesima is seen as a sort of “pre-Lent.” Violet returns as the liturgical colour, we cease singing the Gloria, and swap the Alleluias for the Tracts (with their familiar penitential leitmotifs that run up until the Easter itself). There may even be a ceremonial “Burial of the Alleluia.”[2]

Some treat Septuagesima as a time to start thinking about Lent: a time to start hardening ourselves up, so that we “hit the ground running” on Ash Wednesday.

However, the season of Septuagesima is considerably richer and more interesting than a mere ante-chamber to Lent.

In fact, according to some writers, it is no less than the true beginning of the liturgical year.

What is Septuagesima?

In the previous essays on the liturgical year, I drew much from the writings of Fr Johannes Pinsk.[3] According to Pinsk, the Advent–Christmas–Epiphany cycle does not focus on the historical events in Christ’s life for their own sake. Rather, the liturgy uses those events to point to Christ’s second coming, and to the eternal consummation of the marriage feast of the Lamb.

Throughout that cycle, the Church treats these future realities as if they were present to us already: indeed, in a real sense, they were (and still are). She uses her present celebrations of past events to point to future realities, and through this means she makes those future realities present to us.

For the last few weeks, we have been singing, hearing and praying the same liturgical propers each week in the last few Sundays after Epiphany. Here are some of them:

Introit: Adore God, all you His angels: Sion hears and is glad, and the cities of Juda rejoice. V. The Lord is King; let the earth rejoice; let the many isles be glad.

Gradual: The nations shall revere Your name, O Lord, and all the kings of the earth Your glory. For the Lord has rebuilt Sion, and He shall appear in His glory.

Offertory: The right hand of the Lord has struck with power: the right hand of the Lord has exalted me; I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.

Communion: All marvelled at the words that came from the mouth of God.

In these propers, we enter a world restored in Christ, and their repetition each week evokes permanence and resolution: a sense of having finally arrived.

But the time has come, Pinsk says, for the Church remind herself and her children of the tension between “already” and “not yet.” The time has come for us to be reminded of another aspect of our present state, wandering through this valley of tears and in need of salvation. Pinsk writes:

“A new season has dawned, dark and foreboding, The Epiphany of the Lord recedes behind the shadows and darkness of our world in the form of misery and cast by sin over us and death, conflict and tribulation, error and self-deception.”[4]

Septuagesima seems to be a “reset” in the tone of the liturgy: by contrast, there is no such break between the last Sundays after Pentecost and the start of Advent, which seem to flow together naturally. Pinsk continues:

“Anyone stumbling unawares from the last Sunday after Epiphany into Septuagesima Sunday will certainly realize with a shock that he is in an entirely different atmosphere, cold, stormy and threatening.”[5]

Although the light of the Epiphany fades into the background, we are not to conclude that its vision of the permanent victory of Christ was an illusion. On the contrary:

“[I]t is and remains a reality, indeed the decisive reality. But the Christian world is not yet ready to look upon that epiphany in all its fullness and immediacy; the Christian world, that is each one of us.

“And so this Septuagesima, this seventy-day period, stretches out before us; we must traverse it to the place where our Lord died, so that there we may become partakers of the glory of his resurrection.”[6]

This is the mystery revealed in this “shocking break between one Sunday and the next.”[7]

The Start of the New Year

I have previously explained why some think that Advent does not represent the start of the liturgical year, and why Epiphanytide represents the end of the liturgical year.[8]

Now we can consider why Septuagesima might be the better logical starting point for the annual cycle. This is not to say that we should reject Advent as the beginning of the year. This paradigm could simply be seen as another annual cycle running concurrently, giving us a different insight into the logic of the Roman Liturgy.

At Matins on Septuagesima Sunday, the Church abruptly stops reading St Paul’s Epistles, and begins reading the Book of Genesis: starting, of course, with the Creation, and then the Fall of Man. For some writers, this is itself an indication for treating Septuagesima as the start of the liturgical year, and as a season of beginnings.

For instance, Fr Adrian Fortescue, among others, suggests that the Roman Church begins reading the Book of Genesis here because “the ecclesiastical year was counted as beginning then in the spring.”[9] Bouyer also writes:

“Another very striking feature of the liturgical year, still present today, is that the annual reading of the Bible, in the lectio continua of Matins, does not begin on the First Sunday of Advent, but on Septuagesima, with the book of Genesis; and the reading goes on consecutively all through the following year [..]” [10]

In Exodus 12, God tells Moses and Aaron that the month of the Passover was to be the first month of their year. In a similar way, Easter might seem to mark a start of the year, with Easter itself starting (in a sense) with the period of Septuagesima. To this end, Pinsk writes:

“It is becoming a more and more probable opinion that what we call our Church’s Year did not originally fill out the entire span of the astronomical year; rather the feast of the Resurrection was inserted into the early part of this natural cycle, the time of preparation for this feast was gradually lengthened until the actual festal season was made to begin with Septuagesima Sunday, with the Nativity cycle being advanced to precede it.

“So there is no inner nexus between the last Sundays after Epiphany and the pre-Lenten season. Rather there is a break; but this break as such is not only meaningful but good and profitable.”[11]

This way of looking at the cycle may shine a light on the season – not least on the abrupt change in the Mass and other liturgical texts – and may help us grow in love for God and contemplation of Christ’s mysteries.

The state of man

The reading of Genesis also reveals to us why it is that the Introit’s “the terrors of death” and “the cords of the nether world” are around us. It brings us face to face with God’s gratuitous goodness in creating all things – as well as the ignominy of the Fall, and the sorry state into which mankind descended. Dom Prosper Guéranger writes:

“The holy Church calls us together today in order that we may hear from her lips the sad history of the fall of our first parents. This awful event implies the Passion and cruel Death of the Son of God made Man, who has mercifully taken upon Himself to expiate this and every subsequent sin committed by Adam and us his children.

“It is of the utmost importance that we should understand the greatness of the remedy; we must, therefore, consider the grievousness of the wound inflicted.”[12]

So what exactly is that we learn from the Church’s reading of Genesis in this time?

The Church’s liturgical reading of Genesis in Septuagesima reminds us that we are there with Adam, disobeying God and doomed to labour for thorns, until we return to the dust.

Not only that: we are there also with Cain, nursing malice towards our brother. We are there with the wicked men, who were washed away by the flood. We are there with Esau, selling away our birth right for a mess of pottage. We are there with Juda, confounded by the revelation of what we thought were secret sins. We are there with Joseph, sold into slavery in Egypt.

All these events reveal to us the dire situation of man before Christ, as well as our constant tendency to slip back into these dangers, even now.

But just as importantly, they reveal to us our inability to save ourselves, and our absolute need for Our Lord Jesus Christ, our one and only Saviour.

Through Septuagesima, therefore, the Church teaches us that it is Christ who was promised in the Garden of Eden; it is Christ who will save us in his Church, as he saved Noah from the flood in the Ark; it is in Christ that we are to be blessed, and made Abraham’s posterity in faith (like the stars of the sky); and, looking forward to the Exodus, it is by Christ that we are to be led out of Egypt, the house of slavery. We are to be redeemed, at the cost of the firstborn and the paschal lamb’s blood, and led through water into the land which God has promised us.

Progressing through the Sundays of Septuagesima

As the Sundays approach the beginning of Lent, this anxiety turns more and more into trust and confidence. Nonetheless, these Sundays always maintain a sense of our helplessness and dependence on God amidst danger, and a focus on persecution and what must be suffered for Christ.

In former times, Easter (specifically the Vigil) was the time of baptism. It was the time of salvation for those seeking to enter the Church, the Ark of Salvation, and thus to pass through water into life. As the Sundays of Septuagesima and Lent progress, we see the Church’s liturgy focus more and more on these catechumens preparing for that moment.

For example, on Sexagesima Sunday, she warns those seeking to enter the Church of the difficulties in persevering: we see this in Christ’s Parable of the Sower, and in St Paul’s long account of all the various sufferings and persecutions which he has had to endure for Christ. But here we see anguish giving way to encouragement: in this latter Epistle, the Lord God tells St Paul:

“My grace is sufficient for thee: for power is made perfect in infirmity. Gladly therefore will I glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”

In the Gospel for Quinquagesima, Our Lord warns his disciples about his coming humiliation and suffering – and we see this combined with his healing of the man who cried out to him, “Lord, that I may see.”

Why exactly is the Church giving us these stark reminders?

She seems to want the catechumens to understand their state, and their need for Christ. Her liturgy serves as a warning: the catechumens are to prepare to lose everything. In baptism, they will die to sin and to the “old Adam” – but they may well find that their own comfortable lives are over as well. The Church reminds them of the desperate situation in which man finds himself, both due to the fall of Adam and his own personal sins. She seems to be warning the catechumens that while God will save them, the way of salvation is one of suffering and persecution.

But even if these liturgical texts might be aimed primarily at catechumens preparing for baptism and entrance into the Church, it is completely transparent that they also apply to us too – we who might have been in the ranks of Christ’s army for years (or even decades). Pinsk tells us:

“This coming season is precisely the time when we must come to grips, more earnestly than at other times, with the temptations that threaten our life with God in Christ.

“It is the season in which we must take ourselves more sternly and strictly in hand than at other times, so that we may not, in our thoughtlessness, misunderstand the good things offered to us in earthly forms, so that we may not become entangled in externals and so become conformed to the world, that world that is in such a sad and desperate state.”[13]

It is to this end that the Church wants us to stir ourselves up for battle, remembering the duties and struggle of the Christian life that we ourselves took on in our own baptism. We find this sentiment perfectly expressed in the Mass texts at the start of this season.

The Mass texts themselves

In the Epistle for Septuagesima Sunday, St Paul sets out the very purpose and programme of this life in Christ.

He uses the image of professional games to remind us that we are not playing for the mere fun of it: we are engaged in more a serious business than the most serious of athletes. He urges us to take our business more seriously than they take theirs:

“Do you not know that those who run in a race, all indeed run, but one receives the prize? So run as to obtain it. And everyone in a contest abstains from all things – and they indeed to receive a perishable crown, but we an imperishable.

“I, therefore, so run as not without a purpose; I so fight as not beating the air; but I chastise my body and bring it into subjection, lest perhaps after preaching to others I myself should be rejected.”

Is this not a manifesto, not just for Lent, but for the whole Christian life? Pinsk summarises:

“We hear one message: the Christian life does not run its course upon the sunlit meadows of the Epiphany; it is a hard struggle with much groaning and tumult.

“Yet at the end lies the victor crown for all eternity for those that really live from baptism and the spiritual food and the spiritual drink, even though there always hang over their head as a solemn warning the words, ‘Yet with most of them God was not well pleased.’”[14]

The mission given to us by St Paul is clear: run seriously in the race, compete seriously for the crown of eternal life with Christ. The alternative is to stay in the horror of the Introit, sink into the degradation depicted in Genesis, and risk joining those who followed Moses in the desert, receiving untold spiritual blessings, and yet ending their days by displeasing God and being forbidden from entering into his rest. The Epistle reads:

“[A]ll in Moses were baptized, in the cloud and in the sea: And did all eat the same spiritual food: And all drank the same spiritual drink: (And they drank of the spiritual rock that followed them: and the rock was Christ.) But with most of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the desert.”

This, too, should remind us of how many fall during persecution; and that many never rise again in repentance. This is a very abrupt change from the overarching theme of Epiphanytide, of having already arrived and entered into that very rest.

But Christ does not intend to leave us alone in these efforts. The post-communion prayer for the Septuagesima Sunday displays the mysterious relationship between desiring and receiving the grace of God, which is absolutely necessary for the programme set out by St Paul:

“May Your faithful people, O God, be strengthened by Your gifts; that by receiving them, they may still desire them, and by desiring them, may evermore receive them.”

Throughout this whole Mass the Church returns again and again to eternal life, considering it as a prize, or as a gift, or as a wage given as a reward for labour.

As we have seen, these sentiments are not reserved for Septuagesima Sunday alone. The following “Gesima” Sundays present the same realities about what lies ahead for each Christian, what Christ expects of us, and how he will help us reach Calvary with him. In the words of the book of Ecclesiasticus, in which “temptation” carries more the sense of trials and tests:

“Son, when thou comest to the service of God, stand in justice and in fear, and prepare thy soul for temptation.” (Ecclesiasticus 2.1)

Conclusion: The Call of the King

In the parable of the vineyard, read on Septuagesima Sunday, the Lord of the vineyard did not labour with the workers whom he called. Nonetheless, this idea of labour may call to mind a meditation from St Ignatius of Loyola.

First, he presents us with the call of the good, earthly king:

“It is my will to conquer all the lands of the Infidel. Therefore, whoever wishes to join with me in this enterprise must be content with the same food, drink, clothing, etc. as mine. So too he must work with me by day, and watch with me by night, etc., that as he has had a share in the toil with me, afterwards, he may share in the victory with me.”[15]

Then we have the call of Christ, the Eternal King, issued to all men to and every person in particular:

“It is my will to conquer the whole world and all my enemies, and thus to enter into the glory of my Father. Therefore, whoever wishes to join me in this enterprise, must be willing to labour with me, that by following me in suffering, he may follow me in glory.”[16]

In the Advent–Christmas–Epiphany cycle, the Church has already shown us that Christ our King has fulfilled his will “to conquer the whole world and all [his] enemies”, whom he has put under his feet. In Epiphanytide, we have already seen and lived the glory of his Father, into which we are to follow him.[17]

But now, as Septuagesima begins, we are brought back to the beginning.

Let’s not treat this as a time of idle imaginings of what we might do in Lent. Nunc coepi – “Now I begin.” Whether we are preparing for baptism ourselves, or are simply in need of our own recommencement, this is the time to decide once more (and more resolutely than before) to submit to Christ as our King, to labour with him, and to follow him in suffering and persecution; and all this, so that we may follow him into the glory which we have tasted in the Advent–Christmas–Epiphany cycle.

If we pay attention to the Church’s liturgy, and enter into it and allow ourselves to be formed by it, then Septuagesima can mark the beginning of a new year of grace.

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Further Reading:

Fr Henry James Coleridge – The Preparation of the Incarnation
Dom Prosper Guéranger – The Liturgical Year
Fr Johannes Pinsk – The Cycle of Christ

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