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Christmas is the most wondrous day of our calendar in any year of our lives. The bright lights, smells, and smiles discernible even to an infant quickly grow into a sense of hope, awe, and mystery as young boys and girls crane their necks on the car ride back from papa’s house to look out the window for a sign of that bright red nose in the sky. As time moves on, our hopes turn to the company of friends and family, and our awe to the sacred mysteries of God made man for our sake. Our experience of Christmas...

The Liturgical Year   Unlike pagan religions which see time as an endless cycle, Christians see time as being linear; it has a beginning and will have an end. Within Christianity's linear, "big picture" sense of time, though, the passing of hours is experienced as cycles of meditations on holy things. Think of a spiral -- of a circle of time moving ever forward toward His Coming -- and you will have a sense of "Catholic time." The Catholic year (the "liturgical year") is made special by cycles of celebrations commemorating the lives of Jesus and His mother, the angels, and...

Featured Term (selected at random):SEPTUAGESIMA The seventieth day before Easter, and the third Sunday before Lent. Terminolgy not used in the Latin Rite since the revision of the liturgy after the Second Vatican Council. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

It wasn’t a coincidence. When Martin Luther decided to nail his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenburg Castle Church, he chose Halloween to do it. This Augustinian monk held fiercely to many grievous doctrinal errors, but he did understand one thing: the liturgical year of the Catholic Church. The liturgical year is meant to do two things at once: through it, we cast our eyes back towards Christ’s life on earth and through it we simultaneously cast our eyes forward through the long history of mankind, a history which will be crowned in the Parousia, the Second Coming of...