Septuagesima: the pre-Lent season of the 1962 Missal

Septuagesima is the name of the ninth Sunday before Easter, and of the short season it opens in the 1962 Missal: three Sundays, Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima, with the weekdays between them, running up to Ash Wednesday. The Church puts on violet and lays aside the Gloria and the Alleluia, but the Lenten fast has not yet begun. The calendar of 1969 folded these weeks into Ordinary Time, so the season is kept today with the 1962 Missal and in a few other books.

The three Sundays and their names

The names are Latin ordinals: the seventieth, sixtieth and fiftieth. They count back in round tens from Quadragesima, the “fortieth”, the Latin name for Lent and for its First Sunday. They are not exact counts. Septuagesima falls 63 days before Easter, Sexagesima 56 and Quinquagesima 49; only the last comes out at fifty if you count both Sundays.

Each Sunday has its own proper texts, the same every year. The Epistles move from the discipline of the Christian life, through the apostle’s sufferings, to the charity that gives both their meaning:

Read in order, the three Gospels make a short journey. Septuagesima’s parable is about labourers called into the vineyard at different hours of the day. Sexagesima’s is about seed and the ground that receives it. On Quinquagesima, Jesus takes the Twelve aside, tells them plainly that he is going up to Jerusalem to suffer, and on the road heals a blind man who asks for his sight. Lent takes up the story from there.

The Missal heads each Mass with its Roman station, the church where the Pope once celebrated it: St Lawrence outside the Walls, St Paul outside the Walls and St Peter’s. Fittingly, the Sexagesima collect asks for the protection of the Apostle of the Gentiles. The Sundays are old. They were already kept in Rome by the time of Pope Gregory the Great, at the end of the sixth century, and some of his surviving sermons were preached on them.

What changes in the Mass

From Septuagesima Sunday the Mass of the season takes on much of the look of Lent:

• Violet vestments are worn on the Sundays and weekdays of the season.
• The Gloria is not said at the Masses of the Sundays and weekdays, though saints’ feasts in these weeks keep it.
• The Alleluia disappears from every Mass and every Office until the Easter Vigil. In the Office it is bidden farewell at Vespers on the Saturday evening before Septuagesima, with an Alleluia added twice at the end.
• At Mass, a Tract follows the Gradual in place of the Alleluia: verses of a psalm sung straight through, without a refrain. Septuagesima’s begins De profundis, “out of the depths”; Quinquagesima’s begins Jubilate Deo.
• In the Divine Office, the scripture readings at Matins go back to the beginning of Genesis, to creation and the Fall, and over the following weeks reach Noah and Abraham.

What does not change is as telling. There is no fast and no ashes. The weekdays are ferias of the fourth class, the lowest rank, so a saint’s day falling on one is kept in its own colour as usual, only without the Alleluia. The Sundays themselves are of the second class. The season is a threshold rather than a first instalment of Lent: it lets the change of mood come before the change of discipline.

When they fall

Because they hang from Easter, the three Sundays move with it. Septuagesima is never earlier than 18 January and never later than 22 February. An early Easter therefore cuts short the Sundays after the Epiphany, leaving as few as one, and some of those left over are said in November instead, before the last Sunday after Pentecost (see Ordinary Time).

Lent then begins on Ash Wednesday, 10 February 2027, in both calendars alike.

Fixed feasts can still land in these weeks. The Purification of Our Lady on 2 February can fall after Septuagesima and keeps its white vestments and its Gloria, though not the Alleluia. When it falls on one of the three Sundays, the 1962 Missal celebrates the feast in place of the Sunday, which is why the table above may show it there.

Where the season went

The reform of the calendar in 1969 removed Septuagesima as a season. Its weeks became part of Ordinary Time, its Sundays became numbered Sundays in Ordinary Time, and they are green, with the Gloria and the Alleluia, like any others. In the Ordinary Form, Lent alone, from Ash Wednesday, carries the preparation for Easter. That is why the two columns of this calendar disagree in colour for about two and a half weeks each year: violet on the 1962 side, green on the other.

The names have lived on outside the 1962 Missal too. The Book of Common Prayer of 1662 gives each of the three Sundays its own collect, and the Missal of the Personal Ordinariates for former Anglicans keeps them as a season before Lent. The Byzantine tradition has its own sequence of preparatory Sundays leading into the Great Fast.

The last days before Ash Wednesday are known in English as Shrovetide, from the old practice of going to confession, being “shriven”, before Lent. The feasting and carnival customs that gathered around them belong to popular tradition rather than to the Missal.

For how the colours of these weeks compare across the two Missals, see the liturgical colours; for the rank of their Sundays and weekdays, the classes of feast in the 1962 Missal.