Confusion over Immaculate Conception date
Today is the observed feast of the Immaculate Conception. It should have fallen on December 8th, which fell on a Sunday this year.
A little insider baseball from someone who works in a parish office. The
Vatican office in charge of things like this made a relatively recent
clarification that the Church really should make every effort to follow
all 4 Sundays of Advent, so Advent Sundays should trump other days of obligation like what is being observed today (which technically should have been yesterday).
As
I understand from the Chancery office in my diocese, the practice for
the last 20+ years or so more has been that the Immaculate Conception
would trump the Advent Sunday propers if it fell on a Sunday, but the
Vatican ruled (just in the last few months) this has been an incorrect
application of this over that. This had the priests here running the
local Catholic schools in a tizzy because our Diocesan policy is
Solemnities were supposedly religious holidays where schools were closed
and Diocesan employees were contractually supposed to have off.
But
this ruling from the Vatican came out after the school's calendar year
had already been set and approved by the state school board (you have to
have so many in class days in a classroom to maintain accreditation,
and all that.) So, the school administrators had to figure out what to
do, so they are having class and making accomodations to meet Day of
Obligation Mass obligations. Luckily we have an abundance of priests in
this deanery, so we had enough priests to cover the Day of Obligation
Masses as well as teaching school classes. I got asked to lector at the
5:30 pm Mass today because the assistant priest from the parish across
town is coming over to cover it because there's also a basketball
tournament that had been previously scheduled when this was not
originally a calendar Holy Day.
And
my Diocese is a stickler for Liturgical correctness, so this was a big
deal. And, to be fair, some of the Daily Missalettes from some of the
big companies, including the ones my parish uses, were all printed
before the change was announced. So this lead to some confusion in the
pews because the pew missals say Sunday was to have been the Immaculate
Conception, which was rendered incorrect.
So,
long story short(ish), I can understand why some dioceses might have
had to give a dispensation if they were really short handed covering the
Catholic schools, etc, because the school calendar had been set before
this ruling from the Vatican came out and messed up the secular
calendars.
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