Ordinary Time: why it has two parts and thirty-three or thirty-four weeks

Ordinary Time is the part of the Church’s year that belongs to no particular season: the weeks between Christmas and Lent, and the longer stretch between Pentecost and Advent. It comes in two parts because Lent and Easter move with the date of Easter and cut into the year at a different point each time. Its weeks are numbered, and after Pentecost the count is set from the far end, so that the last week is always the thirty-fourth, beginning with the solemnity of Christ the King.

What Ordinary Time is

Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter each dwell on one part of the story of salvation. The weeks outside them have no single theme. The Universal Norms on the Liturgical Year describe them as time given to the mystery of Christ as a whole rather than to one aspect of it, kept above all on Sundays, and set their length at thirty-three or thirty-four weeks (no. 43).

The English name can mislead. The Latin is tempus per annum, “time through the year”, and nothing in it suggests the time is unimportant: its weeks are simply known by their numbers. The colour is green. On Sundays the Gospel works steadily through the year’s evangelist, Matthew, Mark or Luke, one passage after another (see Sunday cycles and weekday years). Many great days fall within it all the same: the Holy Trinity, Corpus Christi, Saints Peter and Paul, the Assumption and All Saints are all kept during Ordinary Time.

Why it comes in two parts

The Church’s year has two centres. Christmas has a fixed date. Easter does not: it falls on the Sunday after the first full moon of spring, as the Church’s tables reckon it, and so can be any date from 22 March to 25 April. Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, forty-six days before Easter, and Easter Time runs for fifty days to Pentecost. That whole block slides by up to five weeks from one year to the next.

Ordinary Time fills what is left. According to the Universal Norms (no. 44), it begins on the Monday after the Sunday following 6 January, which is the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, and runs until the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. It begins again on the Monday after Pentecost and runs until the evening before the First Sunday of Advent. Where the Epiphany is kept on a Sunday and falls on 7 or 8 January, the Baptism of the Lord moves to the Monday, and Ordinary Time begins on the Tuesday.

The 1962 Missal divides the same stretches differently: Sundays after Epiphany, then the pre-Lent weeks of Septuagesima, and Sundays after Pentecost until Advent.

How the weeks are counted

The Baptism of the Lord stands in place of the first Sunday, so the first numbered Sunday is the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, and the first week begins on the day after the Baptism. The count runs on until Ash Wednesday interrupts it, always partway through a week.

After Pentecost the count does not simply pick up where it stopped. It is set from the end of the year instead: the week before Advent must be the thirty-fourth, and the Monday after Pentecost takes whatever number that requires. If the number before Lent and the number after Pentecost are not consecutive, the week between them is not used that year. Trinity Sunday and, where it is kept on a Sunday, Corpus Christi take the place of the first Sundays after the break. Since 2018 the Monday after Pentecost has been the memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church.

In your calendar this year, Ordinary Time begins on 12 January 2026, breaks off in week 6 on Ash Wednesday, 18 February 2026, and resumes in week 8 on 25 May 2026, the day after Pentecost. Week 7 is left out, so 2026 has thirty-three weeks of Ordinary Time.

Thirty-three or thirty-four weeks

How many weeks Ordinary Time has depends on how the year’s moveable dates fall: the Sunday after the Epiphany, the date of Easter and the First Sunday of Advent. There is no rule to memorise beyond the one above. Count back from Advent to the thirty-fourth week, count forward from January, and Pentecost falls somewhere between; whether the two counts meet or leave a gap decides the total.

Thirty-three is the more common answer. Between 1971 and 2100, roughly two years in every three have thirty-three weeks, and the rest have thirty-four. Either way, the readings and prayers for each numbered week are already in the books, so nothing has to be composed for a short year; a week’s Mass is simply not reached.

The last week and Christ the King

The Thirty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time is the solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, and the week it begins is the last of the Church’s year. Its readings turn to the end of time and the return of Christ, and the following Sunday is the First Sunday of Advent. The next is on 22 November 2026.

The feast is relatively recent. Pope Pius XI instituted it in 1925, with the encyclical Quas primas, and set it on the last Sunday of October, where the 1962 Missal still keeps it. The 1969 calendar raised it to a solemnity, gave it its present title, and moved it to the last Sunday before Advent, so that it closes the Church’s year.

The 1962 Missal also ends its year looking to the last days, by a different route. Its last Sunday before Advent always takes the Mass of the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, whose Gospel is Christ’s discourse on the end of the age (Matthew 24), and any Sundays after Epiphany that were cut short by an early Septuagesima are said in November to fill the gap. You can compare the two endings side by side in the Ordinary Form and 1962 calendars compared.