With the feast of Christ’s Baptism yesterday, we enter back into what we now call ‘Ordinary Time’, a term not opposed to ‘extraordinary’ – for all time is such from out eschatological Catholic perspective – but rather from the ‘ordinal’ numbers after which the Sundays are now named, with yesterday being the ‘First’, next Sunday the ‘Second’, all the way to a rather Christological ’33’ Sundays to the end of the year…
I’m with Father Scott Murray, and would prefer more descriptive titles, such as ‘Septuagesima’ Sunday. But such is part and parcel of any number of things needed with deep liturgical renewal. Someday, dear reader, patience is rewarded, one way or another.
This 13th of January, we celebrate Saint Hilary (+367), Bishop of Poitiers and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius IX in 1851 for his clear and incisive writings against the pernicious heresy of Arianism, which denied the divinity of Christ, a heresy which would in turn have dissolved the Church (and very nearly did so, as the near-contemporary Saint Jerome would soon lament). Hilary is considered the pre-eminent theologian of the 4th century, laying the foundation for the full doctrine of the Trinity and of Christ, as well as the theologies of Augustine, Athanasius, the Council of Nicaea and on into the Middle Ages and the modern era, the whole ‘living Tradition’ of the Church.