A Complete Story

New Zealand Tablet, 17 April 1924, Page 13

A Complete Story

The Breviary Explains Itself

(From the Ecclesiastical licvicxc.) 1. The Padre looked at the time table and then grumbled, “Still an hour,” which means, as I found out, that in another hour we should get home, his and my future home. Though curious enough about the new place,- I kept very quiet because the Father, while not praying, kept a close eye on me. He was little concerned with my insides and. feelings, but was examining my uniform. I do not mean the overcoat (which here they call “binding”), nor the overalls of black made by the nun of the convent from which wo had just come. What seemed to engage his attention was the front, under my vest—the rabbi and Roman collar, so to speak, which I call Be Anno et ejus parfihus. ' He was evidently somewhat disturbed (despite his learning in liturgical matters) about the Epacts, and Dominical and Golden Letters— Cyclus Epactnnnn, Litterae Bominicales, Litterae Anreae. There was a certain satisfaction however in instructing the Padre. He wanted to know things from the bottom up —always. So I kept on telling him some things which of course he knew already, -lie petit a juvant. There are twelve months in the year, and that makes fifty-two weeks or three hundred and sixty-five days, and nearly six hours, during which the sun travels through the zodiac. After four years those six hours over the three hundred and sixty-five days make up, as everybody can see, an additional day of twenty-four hours. That day is tacked on at the end of February, in what the Americans, who for the most part speak English, call Leap Year. Ye say Bissextilis; that is, a year when a day is added twice, once.for every six months. . I said “nearly six hours,” to be accurate, since some seconds are wanting, which after they amount to a day must be made up. Hence Pope Gregory XIII., who had to rule the Church for about a dozen years when Luther had caused trouble with his mis-called reformation business, tried to bring some order into the habits of people by revising the calendar. We had of course a calendar before; but ( like the Greek and Latin poems of the humanists Erasmus and.his ilk —it largely borrowed from the pagans, and was confusing enough. A clever Roman general, Julius Caesar, who aspired to the papacy some fifty-years before Our Lord established it, tried to exercise the function of Sovereign Pontiff and began by making a calendar. It did not satisfy people for any length of time. - Meanwhile the Church was "established, but being persecuted it was unable to attend to the calendar. When

eventually the, real Popes were permitted to have their say to the world at large, matters were rather mixed up. Even the great Gregory I.; who had organised the liturgical functions and- the chant in the Church, must have been handicapped, if not napping, because in his e sponsor iule he never mentions the Circumcision or Ash Wednesday, though he has Christmas all right on the twentyfifth of December, and he also gives the feast of the Chair of St. Peter on February 22, which is not surprising, seeing that he sat upon it.

After a while came the other Gregory who took things in hand. First he reorganised the methods of canon law and the study of theology. For this purpose he called the most learned men to Rome. He opened at least six national colleges in the Holy City—never minding what people said about the Irish and the Germans. In fact he found out for himself what was going on in the much-maligned States of Central Europe by having nunciatures in Vienna, Cologne, and even Lucerne. In his discussion with the learned men around him he discovered that we were all at sixes and sevens with the sun and the moon, though these were the celestial bodies set by God in the sky, to regulate our days and nights. We were actually behind ten days in our calculations with heaven. So Gregory XIII. seht out a Bull ordering that after the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, October 4, we should all on waking up on the following'day count it as the fifteenth of October— as’if we had been asleep for ten days. And so it* happened. The Franciscans had talk at supper that evening, and when they woke up for Matins the Friar Lector read from the new Martyrology about St. Fortunatus on the Aurelian Way, and three hundred martyrs of Cologne, and St. Hedwigis, but never a word about the whole group of saints, including two popes, St. Mark and St. Callistns, and St. Denis the Areopagite, whose feasts had occurred in the ten days that were skipped. So they set to work quickly making more saints, and a few years later sent P. Felix Cantalicius and P. Pascal Baylon straight to heaven, though without their canonisation papers immediately. It stirred the other Orders also to make more saints. The Jesuits had already despatched fifed- holy Founder and Francis Borgia and Francis Xavier to engage tickets for Paradise, and young Stanislaus of Kostka was blessing the cradle of Aloysius Gonzaga to hail him as a companion saint twenty-three years later. Friar Thomas of \ illanova also had earned his crown by observance of the Augustinian Rule, and as bishop and “Father of the Poor.” So had Peter of Alcantara and John of Avila, leaving behind them the odor of sanctity, so as to invite and attract -those who were still living to follow and swell the lists of my calendar. Meanwhile there was Cardinal Charles Borromeo among the seculars still busy at Milan, though soon to go Home; and dear Teresa, w oiking at Lisbon, who was to take St. Hedwigis’s place on October lo and make the Queen of Poland move up to October 17.

2. As 1 was saying, Pope Gregory sent out a Bull to make everybody drop ten days which' the calendar makers had added to the age of the world as if Almighty God had not done rightly His business. Everybody that knew anything about astronomy' saw of course at once that the Pope was right; only the Russians did not; and it took Englishmen about a hundred and seventy years to see it, although it was no joke. So since 1752 the Britishers have conformed to our way in reckoning time; but their stubbornness dissatisfied the Americans and they soon after declared their independence, accepting of course my calendar, with the arrangement for future calculation that had been made by Pope Gregory XIII. To avoid trouble as far as possible hereafter Pope Gregory laid down the rule that, whilst the year according to the common reckoning has three hundred and sixty-five days, all those years whose numbers are divisible by... four hundred, and those divisible by four, but not by one hundred shall have three hundred 'and sixty-six days. Thus it comes about that, beginning with 1700, three out of every four centesimal leap years—that is 1700, 1800, 1900, not however 2000—should have three hundred and sixty-five days in. dur calendar reckoning. ;

v 3. > ■' T - ‘ * "What puzzled the Father was much more, I think, the Golden Number, and the Dominical Letter, and the Ep acts'. So I shall have to tell him.

The Golden Number is a figure— one and nineteen -which was regularly printed 'in golden letters upon old-fashioned Almanacs, to indicate the current year of the- lunar cycle. The lunar cycle is a period of nineteen years by which the time of Easter, the first Sunday after the full , moon of the spring equinox, is calculated. The moon is a bit fickle in its movements, and so it happens that it gets out of harmony with the movements of the steadier sun. To .make them agree at the end of the year (to adjust the solar and lunar years, as scientists would say), the Greek astronomer Melon had long ago (430 15. C.) invented a method, lie had watched the moon and the

sun, and found that the twelve lunations or monthly periods into which we divide our years fall short of the solar year by about eleven days. Every change in the moon, in any year, will accordingly occur eleven days earlier than it did the preceding year. But at the expiration of nineteen years they occur again nearly at the same time. Thus tally was.kept on the unsteadiness of the moon, so that its being full at a given time could be computed in advance. Then we would know when to look for Easter. A further help to accuracy in determining the days of the solar (civil) month, on which the new and full moons occur, is the calculation of the monthly Epact. The word Epact is Greek and means “thrown in.” to designate the days thrown in to make up the diflerence in duration between the lunar and solar years. These Enact days give us the age of the moon on each New Year’s day. As I said above, the lunar year falls short of the solar year about eleven days. If the new moon of the lunar cycle falls on January 1, the Epact is 0. The following year the Epact of addition made to the lunar year is XI; in the third year it will he XXII. The Epact of the fourth year would lie XXXIII; but on the thirtieth of these thirty-three days new moon has again appeared, so that the Epact corresponding to the fourth year in the lunar cycle is 111 (the Golden Number).

1 lie lunar month, you see, consists of twenty-nine days, eleven hours, forty-four minutes. Hence the monthly Epact or addition in January, which has thirty-one days according to our civil reckoning, is one day and six minutes. The Epact increases of course each month; and by December it reaches eleven days. If the lunar months are reckoned at twenty-nine and thirty days the process of calculation is somewhat shortened. By subtracting the annual Epact from thirty-one we get the day on which the now moon of January falls. For February the new moon falls thirty days later; for March twenty-nine days later; for April thirty days later, and so on with the remaining months.

A further aid in determining the date of Easter, which always is a Sunday, is the Dominical Letter. It is one of the first seven letters of our alphabet indicating the relation of the Sundays to the year —to let us know on what date of January falls the first Sunday of that month in any given year. The year (January 1) always begins with the letter A. If that day is a Thursday, the following Sunday is marked D. Ordinarily the Dominical Letter would repeat itself every seventh year. But as a day is added to our Leap Year, and that day repeats the Letter of the normal day, we get two Dominical Letters for every Leap Year. Since this intercalation interrupts the scouemV of the Dominical Letters seven times in twenty-eight years, the same order of Dominical Letters cannot recur oftener than once in twenty-eight years. Allowance must further be made’ for the first- year of the century years calculated as Leap Years.

The baggage delivery man is going through the train, and the Padre interrupted his attention to me by giving him directions for the express agent about his trunk. *1 shall have to hurry up a bit with my explanation.

I saw that my master wanted to know how one could remember the Dominical Letters for all the months of the year, so as readily to count ■ up the Sundays. Happily I could recall a distics made by a clever monk; though I don’t allow it to get into my Totum, because « that kind of poetry smacks a bit of the pagan classics. Here it is:

i Astra Dalit Da minus—Gratisque. Beahit Egenos Giulia Christ i-colu-e Fact Aurea Dona Fideli, dhis couplet of verses by the initials of the word* shows that A is the letter for January, 1) for February and again for March, and &o on. But let. me give an illustration to make the .matter practical, though it demands of course some brains and attention to understand it all. Sup-pose'you-want to know on what day Easter Sunday fell in 1879. > ' Our Lord was born, according to the common reckoning, at the end of the first year in the lunar cycle. So we add one to the year in question—lß79. Divide this number by nineteen, which is the number of years it takes the moon to get steady and come back to the same place, nearly. 1880 - = 98, leaving a remainder of .18, which is 19 ‘ the-Golden Number corresponding to the Epact VII. in my calendar. This means that on January I, 1879, the moon was seven days old, or rather had started on its regular tramp seven days before. Subtracting seven from thirtyone we ascertain that the new moon is due again on January 24, and on February 21 and on March 24, getting full lor the Easter celebration fifteen days later when the spring equinox occurs (April 8). The Sunday following' will be Easter. To make sure on what day of the week April 8 lulls, we need the Dominical Letter. In my table you notice it is E, and if you remember the old monk’s verses you will see how it comes about. April has the indication G, then comes A for April 2, B for April 3. The Dominical Letter E comes on April 6, which therefore must have been a Sunday. The next Sunday is April 13—Easter Sunday. Capitc? The Padre hustled me into his grip and we had to get out. It was rather dark and 1 lea red we should get lost, though 1 was not allowed much light anyway, and had to put up with a comer resting on an old night shirt—a most undignified position for me. From the jolting I judged that we had hired a cab and were at length at the end of our journey. Fit curios casus et tot discrimina. r'erum, as my friend, St. Jerome, used to quote from some Roman pagan poet. That was before liis conversion and after he had read some ol the Bible and got Baptism as a real Christian from Pope Liherius. f was getting a little restless with this continuous irregularity of travelling; and of meeting all sorts of distracting things and people. But then I had the satisfaction of having taught the Padre a thing or two, which not everybody knows or even can understand. Me is likely, too, to spread the benefit to others, young clerics and later on priests who can do much good by their regular and holy lives if they practice what I preach to them every day tor over an hour. I wonder if the Padre will introduce me to them in his LiturgyClass. He is very good company of course by himself; but then I should like to be an assistant professor also. However, 1 must keep quiet, for if the Padre heard me he would say: “You want the earth,” which is true enough, because 1 am a R. B. Totum.