Septuagesima

Today is Septuagesima Sunday, the beginning of a liturgical season known as Septuagesima or Fore-Lent or Shrovetide. It consists of the three weeks immediately before the start of Lent, and indeed the name Septuagesima means seventy, in reference to Quadragesima – forty – which is the proper Latin name for Lent.

This liturgical season, meant to prepare us for the deep-dive of Lent, was removed from the calendar during the reform of 1970. I’ve mentioned before that the calendar reforms were the least comprehensible portions of the liturgical reform to me, and this is a prime example. If you’re going to spend 40 days in penance and fasting, it’s just human nature to require some time preparing for that.

In fact, in the forms and rites where it is still celebrated¹, the colour of vestments is the violet of Lent, and small fasts or penances are encouraged. So how is this different from Lent? Where Lent is a season of obligatory penance, Septuagesima is a season of devotional penance to prepare ourselves for the obligatory penances of Lent².

Let’s let the great Dom Guéranger lead us through our discovery of the season.

Now, the feast of Easter must be prepared for by forty days of recollectedness and penance. Those forty days are one of the principal seasons of the liturgical year, and one of the most powerful means employed by the Church for exciting in the hearts of her children the spirit of their Christian vocation. It is of the utmost importance that such a season of grace should produce its work in our souls – the renovation of the whole spiritual life.

The Church, therefore, has instituted a preparation for the holy time of Lent. She gives us the three weeks of Septuagesima, during which she withdraws us, as much as may be, from the noisy distractions of the world, in order that our hearts may be more readily impressed by the solemn warning she is to give us at the commencement of Lent by marking our foreheads with ashes. …

It is true, there are but sixty-three days between Septuagesima and Easter; but the Church, according to the style so continually used in the sacred Scriptures, uses the round number
instead of the literal and precise one. …

The joys of Christmastide seem to have fled far from us. The forty days of gladness brought us by the birth of our Emmanuel are gone. The atmosphere of holy Church has grown overcast, and we are warned that the gloom is still to thicken. Have we, then, for ever lost Him whom we so anxiously and longingly sighed after during the four slow weeks of our Advent? Has our divine Sun of justice, that rose so brightly in Bethlehem, now stopped His course, and left our guilty earth?

Not so! The Son of God, the Child of Mary, has not left us. The Word was made Flesh in order that He might dwell among us. A glory far greater than that of His birth, when angels sang
their hymns, awaits Him, and we are to share it with Him. Only, He must win this new and greater glory by strange, countless sufferings; He must purchase it by a most cruel and ignominious death: and we, if we would have our share in the triumph of His Resurrection, must follow Him in the way of the cross, all wet with the tears and the Blood He shed for us.

The grave, maternal voice of the Church will soon be heard, inviting us to the lenten penance; but she wishes us to prepare for this “laborious baptism” by employing these three weeks in considering the deep wounds caused in our souls by sin. True, the beauty and loveliness of the little Child born to us in Bethlehem, are great beyond measure; but our souls are so needy that they require other lessons than those He gave us of humility and simplicity.

(The Liturgical Year, Vol. 3, by Dom Prosper Guéranger, OSB)

So even though this small season has vanished from the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, it is nevertheless still a time to recollect ourselves and prepare for Lent. Let’s not waste it.

1. Principally the Extraordinary and Ordinariate Forms of the Roman Rite, but Septuagesima is also celebrated in the traditional Benedictine Office.
2. The Fate of Septuagesima.