The Church is charged not only with the salvation of souls, but with the sanctification of the world. This is a process we cannot expect ever to be complete before the Last Judgement, but it is something of which we must always be mindful. Nations can be sanctified by the baptism of their leaders; the land by processions and pilgrimages passing through it, and by the establishment of churches, shrines and religious communities; the day by the celebration of the Office or the Angelus; and the year by the feasts of the saints and the annual marking of events in the Life, Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord. Since the work of sanctification is best undertaken in a penitential spirit, one very ancient way of further sanctifying the year is the marking of the four seasons with special days of penance: the Ember Days.
In the liturgical reforms of the 1970s, the Ember Days became optional elements of the calendar, to be arranged by bishops’ conferences, and they generally fell out of use. They remain, however, part of the calendar of the Traditional Mass and also appear in the calendar of the Ordinariate. They are a particularly ancient feature of the English Catholic experience, apparently coming here directly from Rome – perhaps under St Augustine of Canterbury himself – before arriving in France and other countries. Their English name has an obscure Old English origin, perhaps ymbren, meaning a circuit or revolution. In other European languages they are known by terms derived from the Latin quatuor tempora, ‘four times’.
Four times a year, then – towards the end of Advent, towards the beginning of Lent, in the week following Pentecost, and in September after the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (September 14) – three days are set aside: a Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Canon law no longer obliges us to fast on these days, but the traditional liturgy provides special Masses for each. There is an extra reading on the Wednesday, and the Saturday Mass recalls the Easter Vigil, with five readings from the Old Testament followed by the Epistle and Gospel as usual.
The Gospel of Ember Saturday is the same as that of the following Sunday, because originally it was a vigil in the strict sense: a night-time service of readings, prayers and chants, followed by Mass at dawn – in other words, the Sunday Mass itself. The liturgical scholar Bl Ildefonsus Schuster remarked laconically in the 1930s that Italian Catholics still kept night vigils, but in bars rather than in churches. To keep vigil is another way of sanctifying the world, specifically the night, and to abandon vigils is to make a concession to the unconverted world.
Whether the restoration of the Easter Vigil as a night-time celebration in the 1950s truly succeeded, readers may judge. The tendency to celebrate it earlier in the evening has reasserted itself as initial enthusiasm has waned. Nevertheless, even when not celebrated at night, the traditional Ember Saturday Mass is a splendid service, well worth attending if one can find it, especially when sung. The chants following each reading are very ancient and beautiful. A particular highlight is the Song of the Three Young Men from the Book of Daniel, set to a lyrical, repeating melody – a reminder that, for the Church, penance is not a time for long faces and self-pity, but a time of joy, leavened by some of her most lovely liturgical music.
Non-Catholics may be surprised to learn that it is in the Mass of Easter Day, with its exceptionally short Gospel, and in the Office of Paschaltide, with its notably simple antiphons, that liturgical short cuts are made – not on days of penance, nor, for that matter, in Masses for the dead.
Another liturgical commentator, Fr Pius Parsch, expressed the spirit of the Ember Days memorably:
‘Lent is our annual retreat, while the Ember Days serve as quarterly check-ups. A grave and earnest mood comes over Mother Church, but there are no tears or mourning. Fasting is not so much an expression of penitence and sorrow as a joyous tithe to God, and an incentive to almsgiving.’ (The Church’s Year of Grace, vol I, pp 104f)
Fr Parsch’s medical metaphor shifts the emphasis from the corporate – the idea of a Christian society sanctifying the year – to the individual. The two are not in conflict, however, since corporate conversion is impossible without individual holiness.
In 1960, priests were permitted to use a shortened option for the Ember Saturday Mass, omitting most of the readings. This has a practical justification in certain circumstances, but there is always a risk in allowing the Church’s liturgy to conform to the secular rhythm of our lives, when it ought instead to disrupt them. The Church exhorts us to ‘be not conformed to this world’ (Romans 12:2). We must allow ourselves to be taken out of our routines, to be inconvenienced by the Faith, if we are to be transformed ourselves and to sanctify the world.
