Pre-Lent is Pro Lent!

Battle of Carnival & Lent - Breugel

Shrovetide, the Pre-Lenten Season, is a period of preparation before the liturgical season of Lent. Shrovetide starts on Septuagesima Sunday, includes Sexagesima Sunday, Quinquagesima Sunday (Shrove Sunday) and Shrove Monday, and culminates on Shrove Tuesday, also known as Mardi Gras.

Catholic Encyclopedia

Shrovetide is the English equivalent of what is known in the greater part of Southern Europe as the "Carnival", a word which, in spite of wild suggestions to the contrary, is undoubtedly to be derived from the "taking away of flesh" (carne levare) which marked the beginning of Lent. The English term shrovetide (from "to shrive", or hear confessions) is sufficiently explained by a sentence in the Anglo-Saxon Ecclesiastical Institutes translated from Theodulphus by Abbot Aelfric about A.D. 1000: "In the week immediately before Lent everyone shall go to his confessor and confess his deeds and the confessor shall so shrive him as he then may hear by his deeds what he is to do [in the way of penance]".

Septuagesima and the Pre-Lenten Sundays

by Clinton A. Brand, PhD

[...] As part of the ongoing implementation of the new Missal approved by the Holy See for the Ordinariates, we begin a practice new to this parish but ancient and universal in Catholic worship from the 6th century until 1969 and a custom retained in the classic Anglican Books of Common Prayer – that is, the observance of a pre-Lenten period of preparation for the season of Lent which is itself a time of preparation for the joyous exultation of Easter.

If the liturgical year rightly begins with Advent anticipating Our Lord's Nativity, the sanctification of time finds its center and axis in the Paschal mystery of His death, burial, and rising to new life. By traditional reckoning, Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first full moon that occurs on or after the day of the ecclesiastical vernal equinox, fixed as March 21. Following the formula decreed by the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD and later adjusted with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, Easter can occur as early as March 22 or as late April 25. Ash Wednesday never comes before February 4 or after March 10. As we heard earlier this year in the Proclamation of the Date of Easter on Epiphany, Easter will be celebrated in 2016 on March 27, and hence Ash Wednesday comes around this year on February 10.

The holy season of Lent, then, is just around the corner. According to the traditional liturgical calendar, long shared by Catholics and Anglicans alike (together with the Eastern Churches and some Lutherans), the last three Sundays before Ash Wednesday constitute a special pre-Lenten season focused on preparing the faithful for their penitential regimen. Though this pre-Lenten season was lost for a time after the post-conciliar liturgical reforms following Vatican II, it is preserved in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite and now features in Ordinariate usage.  On these Sundays the liturgical color is violet, the Gloria in excelsis Deo and the Alleluia go silent (see below), and the Mass propers assume a penitential character – as in Lent – but unlike Lent flowers still adorn the altar and images remain unveiled until the season actually begins on Ash Wednesday.

By this symbolism, the Church invites the people of God to voluntary self-examination and discernment to ready our senses, minds, and souls for the rigors of the coming season of repentance. While Pre-Lent is not a period of obligatory fasting or abstinence, it is a time to look ahead and to formulate a personal rule of self-denial in order to keep a more holy Lent. In other words, by external signs of penitence in the liturgy before the season, we are beckoned to prepare for the internal disciplines of Lent that we may do the Lord’s bidding in sorrow for our sins, “not only with our lips, but in our lives,” and that we might rejoice all the more fervently for our deliverance from the bonds of death on the glorious feast of the Resurrection.

By ancient tradition, the third Sunday before Lent is called Septuagesima since it numbers about seventy days until Easter, recalling also the seventy-year exile of the Hebrews in Babylon. By analogy, the second Sunday in this sequence is Sexagesima, falling as it does some sixty days before the Paschal feast. The last Sunday before Ash Wednesday is Quinquagesima, fifty days out from Easter.  Quadragesima is the traditional Latin name for the first Sunday in Lent or "the fortieth day" before Easter. Prominently restored in the Ordinariate Calendar, these Latinate names recall a worthy patrimony and help mark the essential transition from the festivity of Christmastide to the more sombre character of Lent.

In the medieval England, the beginning of this pre-Lenten season was popularly commemorated by the ritual “burying of the Alleluia” just after First Vespers of Septuagesima when Alleluia was sung for the last time. Inscribed on parchment the word Alleluia was interred in a casket and “buried” or locked away until its “resurrection” at the Easter Vigil. This ceremony of the Depositio Alleluia served to illustrate the captivity of sin until Christ by His victory bursts forth from the tomb, making all things new, and giving us tongues again to sing Alleluia!  He is risen!

The Fathers and Doctors of the Church richly attest to the importance of the pre-Lenten Sundays as a call to ongoing conversion of life, a summons to turn to the Lord in metanoia or repentance. Pope Saint Gregory the Great likened the sequence of these Sundays to the call of the householder in Our Lord’s parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16, the ancient Gospel reading on Septuagesima). More recently, Blessed Pope Paul VI famously compared the ‘gesimas (as these Sundays are known) to the ringing of bells calling the faithful to church at various intervals before Mass to be ready for the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

The bells are tolling. Will you be ready?

- Dr. Brand is a member of Our Lady of Walsingham parish in Houston and serves as professor of English at the University of St. Thomas.

John Mason Neale (1818 – 1866), an Anglican minister, scholar and hymnwriter, translated Alleluia, dulce carmen, a Latin hymn from the 11th Century, that is sung at Evensong on the Saturday before Septuagesima as the Church bids farewell to the Alleluia for the season of Lent.

Alleluia, song of gladness,
Voice of joy that cannot die;
Alleluia is the anthem
Ever raised by choirs on high;
In the house of God abiding
Thus they sing eternally.

Alleluia, thou resoundest,
True Jerusalem and free;
Alleluia, joyful mother,
All thy children sing with thee,
But by Babylon's sad waters
Mourning exiles now are we.

Alleluia cannot always
Be our song while here below;
Alleluia, our transgressions
Make us for a while forego;
For the solemn time is coming
When our tears for sin must flow.

Therefore in our hymns we pray Thee,
Grant us, blessed Trinity,
At the last to keep Thine Easter
With Thy faithful saints on high;
There to Thee for ever singing
Alleluia joyfully.