While March 19 was the only feast day given for St. Joseph in the West since the 10th century, P. Pius IX saw fit to add an extended celebration that would not consistently fall within the season of Lent. On September 10, 1847, he added a solemn octave of the "Patronage of St. Joseph" starting as a double feast of the second class to be celebrated a few Wednesdays after Easter. It was eventually raised into a first class feast in 1870. This feast and its accompanying octave remained in place until P. Pius XII replaced it in 1955 with the feast of "St. Joseph the Worker."The breviary readings for these feast days can still be found at the Divinum Officium site. Unlike the rather banal readings for the Pacellian feast, the 19th-century feast's readings are quite interesting and are drawn mainly from typological Old Testament passages about the Hebrew patriarch Joseph, ruler of Egypt. This octave begins today for those using the pre-Pacellian missal.
It is interesting how difficult it has been for new Josephite feasts to stick in the Roman missal. Pacelli's own feast was demoted a mere fourteen years later in the 1969 revisions to an optional memorial, and John XIII's 1962 insertion of Joseph's name into the canon was similarly lost in the tide of aggiornamento. Will P. Francis' reinsertion of St. Joseph into the Novus Ordo eucharistic prayers result in a similar deletion within a few decades?
"Pacelli's own feast" was not discarded in Novus Ordo. It was just reduced to the rank of "Memoria" (corresponds to III class in 1962 rubrics). St. Joseph likewise remained all the time in the Eucharistic Prayer I.
ReplyDeleteYes, I realized my mistake about the "Worker" feast disappearing while on the train this morning. The post has been corrected.
DeleteWonderful Post, The Rad Trad. Thank you.
ReplyDeletePerhaps another Series on "Discontinued/Lost/Eradicated/Dispensed With/Suppressed Feasts And Octaves" is required in the future ?
in Domino
Wikipedia has some information about the octaves that were wiped out by Pacelli in 1955: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octave_%28liturgical%29
DeleteThank you, J.
DeleteThe September 10th 1847 decree did not give the feast an Octave nor did it place it on a Wednesday but added it to the Universal Kalendar as a D2Cl on the third Sunday after Easter. The Octave was added on 8th December 1870. On 24th July 1911 Pius X renamed it as the Solemnity of St. Joseph and on the 28th October 1913 transferred the feast from the Sunday to the third Wednesday after Easter.
ReplyDelete