What is Advent? (Advent I - Cycle A)

This Sunday is the First Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new liturgical year. Our society has different ways of calculating the timespan of a year. The civic calendar goes from January 1 to December 31. Schools follow the academic calendar, which begins late summer or early autumn and lasts until the spring. The fiscal year starts on July 1 and ends on June 30. A number of ethnic groups also maintain their own traditional calendars.

In the Catholic Church, our calendar is the liturgical year. We start on the First Sunday of Advent, which is the Sunday closest to the Feast of St. Andrew, observed on November 30. We then follow a sequence of seasons and feasts throughout the year, until the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the liturgical year.

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Photo Credit: Advent wreath: Week #1 by Eugenio Hansen, OFS from Wikimedia Commons.

Welcoming Christ to Be the King of Our Lives (Christ the King - Cycle C)

This Sunday, we celebrate the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, which is more popularly known as the Feast of Christ the King. While the feast has biblical roots, its observance was instituted one hundred years ago by Pope Pius XI. He did so in response to the increasing secularization of Western Civilization, whereby Christ was being pushed more and more out of the public sphere. The pope sought to remind the faithful and the world at large that Christ is King of all the world, now and always.

Before the coming of Christ, the Israelites expected the Messiah to be a great military conqueror, who would overthrow the Roman Empire, which was occupying the Holy Land at the time. In place of Roman rule, the Messiah would set up a new, glorious Israelite kingdom with Jerusalem as its capital. The new kingdom would be the strongest in the world and all the nations of the world would bow down to Jerusalem.

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Photo Credit: Roof fresco of Pantokrator, Nativity of the Theotokos Church, Bitola, North Macedonia from Wikimedia Commons.

Is the End Near? (33rd Sunday - Cycle C)

The Catholic liturgical year runs from the First Sunday of Advent to the Feast of Christ the King, which we will celebrate next Sunday. As we get close to the end of the liturgical year, the readings at Mass focus on the end of the world. Predicting when the world will end is something of a pastime in some parts of American culture. However, the Catholic Church has never tried to predict the time of the end of the world, since Christ has clearly told us that it is not for human beings to know when the world will end.

Instead, we are to live with the expectation that the world might end at any time, while still being focused on our day-to-day responsibilities. A good way to approach the question is with the Benedictine Latin motto "ora et labora," which means to pray and to work. We should pray as if we were about to die in any moment, as if Christ were to return right now. At the same time, we should work as if we were to live in this world indefinitely.

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Photo Credit: The Last Judgement by Fra Angelico from Wikimedia Commons.