FEAST-DAYS AND HOLY-DAYS
What are feasts and holy-days?
Days on which the Church celebrates either certain mysteries of religion, or some passage in the life of Our Lord, or the memory of the saints.
Why has the Church established these holy-days?
She has instituted the feasts of Our Lord that we may be led to remember God s love and mercy toward us; to meditate upon the mysteries, truths, and benefits of the Christian religion ; and to contemplate Jesus as the perfect pattern of a Christian life. On the feasts of the saints our minds are directed to those heroes of Christianity, that we may keep in veneration the lives of the friends of God, and be encouraged to imitate their example.
Has the Church authority to establish holy-days?
Certainly ; for the power which Jesus Christ gave to His apostles and their successors to bind and to loose upon earth includes the power to make laws and regulations for the salvation of the faithful. There is warrant for it, too, in the Old Law, for under that dispensation the Jews celebrated the Pasch, or Easter, to commemorate their deliverance from Egyptian bondage ;Pentecost to thank God for the Ten Commandments of the Law given to Moses on Mount Sinai ; the feast of Tabernacles in commemoration of the forty years journeying through the wilderness.
Which are the holy-days of obligation?
The Circumcision of Our Lord, Ascension Day, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, All Saints Day, the Immaculate Conception, and Christmas.
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