Some festivities shifted to Sunday

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Primate of England and Wales, has announced that the festivities of Epiphany, Ascension and Corpus Christi will no longer be celebrated during the week, but shifted to Sunday. In Catholic schools these feast days have always provided an opportunity to explain to children some of the most important mysteries of the Catholic faith, before taking them to church for mass. As emphasized by Monsignor Mark Langham, administrator of Westminster Cathedral, in a letter published in the Catholic weekly “The Tablet”, following the cardinal’s decision schools are no longer sure whether it is a good thing to continue to celebrate mass on the occasion of these three festivities. It is a pity, however, according to Langham, to abolish weekday masses in the centres of our big cities, permitting as they do an “eruption of the sacred” to break the daily routine. According to some priests, however, it was high time the Catholic Church in England fell into line with those of other European countries. According to Father Anthony McBride of the cathedral of St. John the Evangelist at Salford (Manchester), “the real problem is that an ever smaller number of people celebrate these festivities by going to mass during the week”.