The liturgical colours and when each is worn

The Roman Rite uses six liturgical colours. White is worn for the great feasts and for the seasons of Christmas and Easter, red for the Passion, the Holy Spirit and the martyrs, green for Ordinary Time, violet for Advent and Lent, rose on one Sunday in each of those two seasons, and black for the dead. The 1962 Missal uses the same six, but gives violet, red and black to more days than the Ordinary Form does.

Why the colour changes

The colour of the vestments is a sign you can read from the back of the church. Before a word is spoken it tells you what kind of day it is: a feast or a penitential day, an ordinary Sunday or one of the summits of the year. Followed through twelve months, the colours also trace the shape of the Church’s year, from the violet of Advent through the white of Christmas, the green weeks, the violet of Lent, the white of Easter and the red of Pentecost.

The General Instruction of the Roman Missal gives the reason in a sentence: the colours make visible the character of what is being celebrated and the movement of the Christian year (no. 345). The meanings people attach to each colour, such as hope for green or penance for violet, are long-standing associations rather than definitions. What the books fix is when each colour is worn.

The Roman pattern is old. At the end of the twelfth century the cardinal who became Pope Innocent III already described a scheme built on white, red, black and green, and the Missal of 1570 made a fixed set of rules standard across the Roman Rite. Both of the Missals on this site descend from it, which is why they agree far more often than they differ.

The six colours and when each is worn

A saint’s colour usually follows the manner of their death: red for a martyr, white for everyone else. That explains some apparent exceptions. St John the Evangelist, on 27 December, is white because he was not martyred. The Chair of St Peter and the Conversion of St Paul are white because neither marks an apostle’s death. The birth of John the Baptist on 24 June is white, his beheading on 29 August red.

Rose, black and gold: where practice varies

Rose belongs to two Sundays, each taking its Latin name from the first word of its entrance antiphon: Gaudete in Advent and Laetare in Lent, both meaning “rejoice”. Coming roughly halfway through a season of waiting or penance, the lighter colour marks a pause for joy. It is often not seen in practice: the Ordinary Form permits rose rather than requiring it, and in either Missal a church with no rose vestments simply uses violet. The next Gaudete Sunday in your calendar is 13 December 2026. The next Laetare Sunday is 7 March 2027.

Black is where the two Missals differ most in practice. The Ordinary Form treats violet as the normal colour for funerals and Masses for the dead and allows black where that is the custom (GIRM no. 346). Some bishops’ conferences, the United States among them, also allow white, and in many parishes white is now the usual choice at a funeral. In the 1962 Missal there is no such choice: Requiem Masses, All Souls’ Day and Good Friday are black.

Gold is not on either Missal’s list. In the Ordinary Form it comes in through a separate provision: on more solemn days, finer vestments may be worn even if they are not the colour of the day (GIRM no. 346). In practice that usually means gold in place of white at Christmas, Easter and other great feasts. Under the older rubrics, vestments of real cloth of gold were accepted in place of white, red or green, but not of violet or black.

Blue is not a colour of the Roman Rite. A few places, Spain the best known, hold a long-standing privilege to wear blue for the Immaculate Conception. Blue in Advent comes from other traditions and has no basis in the Roman books.

Where the two Missals part company

For most of the year the two columns of this calendar show the same colour. The differences cluster around Lent, Easter and the dead:

• Before Lent. The three Sundays before Ash Wednesday are violet in the 1962 Missal and green in the Ordinary Form, which has no pre-Lent season. See Septuagesima.
• Palm Sunday. Red throughout in the Ordinary Form. In the 1962 Missal the blessing and procession of palms are in red and the Mass that follows is in violet.
• Good Friday. Red in the Ordinary Form, black in the 1962 Missal. The next one, 26 March 2027, shows both side by side.
• After Pentecost. In the Ordinary Form red is worn for Pentecost Sunday alone, and Ordinary Time resumes the next day. The 1962 Missal keeps Pentecost as an octave, so red continues for the whole week, Ember days included. The next Pentecost is 16 May 2027; follow the week after it in both columns.
• The dead. Violet, black or, where allowed, white in the Ordinary Form; always black in the 1962 Missal.
• Ember days, Rogation days and vigils. These are mostly violet in the 1962 Missal; the Ember days of Pentecost week, falling within its octave, are red. The General Roman Calendar of 1969 left Ember and Rogation days to each bishops’ conference, so they are not part of the general calendar.

Reading the colours on this site

Every day’s page marks the Mass with its colour, and the year page runs a strip of colour under each month so you can see the seasons at a glance. The colour shown is that of the day’s principal celebration. On a green weekday with an optional memorial, a priest who chooses to keep the memorial of a martyr will wear red, so the colour you see in church can differ from the one printed here. Diocesan and parish feasts can change it too.

The same colours run through the printed wall calendar, where every day is set in the colour of its Mass. To see how each colour lines up with a day’s rank, read Solemnity, feast, memorial, and for the older system, the classes of feast in the 1962 Missal.