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Enrich Your Experience of God's Word!
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Getting Oriented to Our Very Own Guide to the Lectionary
The Creation of Man - Manasseh Johnson
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We welcome you to wander through our Lectionary Guide. Together, we walk through the Bible from Genesis through Revelation, with abstracts and discussions on the various books and chapters we use in our daily and Sunday Masses. We also explain the Church's logic for choosing readings in the special seasons of the year, and we provide other resources about the authorship and compilation history of the Bible. We've searched for illustrations to enhance our understanding of this foundation of our faith. (We intend to use only images for which we have permission; please notify us if you think we've used an image without permission.) When this project is complete, it will be comprised of 40 pages.
To jump ahead on this page, please click on the links below:
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Readings for Advent, Christmas, Lent, Triduum, and Easter seasons
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Readings for Ordinary Time (we are currently in Year A of the Sunday cycle and Year I of the daily cycle)
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Other resources for better understanding the Bible
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Don't Know Where to Start?
The Bible is not simply a book, but an entire library of books, spanning a variety of cultures, time periods, and religious beliefs. The portions of it proclaimed at Catholic liturgies are determined by a complex calendar. We suggest one of five places to begin exploring:
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For an overview of the Bible (and to read these pages in a logical order), read this page through and then go to Salvation History.
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If you're looking for a specific book of the Bible, finding a listing at Structure of the Bible.
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To start reading the Bible from the beginning, start with Genesis 1 - 11.
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To start praying through the life of Jesus Christ, start with the Gospel of Mark, and then go through the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Luke, and the Gospel of John.
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To dive in with the current readings, follow the links on our Mass Broadcasts page.
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What Is a Lectionary?
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Jaharis Byzantine Lectionary, circa 1100 and made in Constantinople,
open to folio 43 showing the evangelist Matthew (Metropolitan Museum of Art)A lectionary is a collection of scripture readings for particular liturgies in the life of the Church. Not every verse of the Bible is included in the lectionaries, but in the 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church reorganized the lectionaries for Sunday Masses and daily Masses so that the faithful would hear a larger sampling of Bible passages, a.k.a. pericopes, proclaimed at Mass. The Church provides lectionaries for other occasions and themes, such as for each of the sacraments, for different kinds of blessings, and for praying for vocations. To learn more about the Lectionary, visit the USCCB’s page on Liturgy.
The Sunday lectionary cycle covers Masses offered on Saturdays after 4 pm and all Masses offered on Sundays. This cycle is divided into three years, Years A, B and C. The Daily lectionary cycle covers all Masses on Mondays through Fridays, plus Masses on Saturdays before 4 pm. This cycle is divided into two years, Years I and II. Some celebrations (categorized as solemnities, feasts, or memorials, depending on their relative importance) are affixed to certain calendar days of the year. Some of these celebrations have their own lectionary readings that take precedence over the Daily cycle readings; a few take precedence over the Sunday cycle readings. All Sundays, all solemnities, and some feasts have a first reading, a responsorial psalm, a second reading, and a gospel reading. Daily Masses and memorials typically have only a first reading, a responsorial psalm, and a gospel reading.
In Liturgical Year 2023 (November 27, 2022 - December 2, 2023), we are in Year A of the Sunday cycle and Year I of the Daily cycle. The dates for the liturgical seasons in 2023 are:Season
Dates
Advent
November 26 — December 24 before 4 p.m.
Christmas
December 24 after 4 p.m. — January 9
Ordinary Time
January 10 — February 21
Lent
February 22 — April 6 before sundown
Triduum
April 6 after sundown — April 9
Easter
April 9 — May 28
Ordinary Time
May 29 — December 2
For a detailed day-by-day Liturgical Calendar, please click here.
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The Five "Special" Seasons of the Liturgical Year
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The two principal celebrations of the Church year are the day of Jesus Christ's birth (Christmas Day) and the day of Jesus Christ's resurrection (Easter Sunday). However, both days are surrounded by multiple weeks of other special observances.
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Ordinary Time: Nothing Boring About It!
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Outside the five special seasons, there remain another 33 or 34 weeks each year which the Church designates as "Ordinary Time." (See the explanation on this other page about the variation in the length of Ordinary Time.) These weeks are not considered by the Church to be boring or routine, as the name might imply. “Ordinary” simply means “ordered,” the numerical sequence of the Sundays-Weeks of the liturgical year that are not part of the Church’s five special seasons. The order begins after Advent and Christmas with the 1st Sunday of Ordinary Time, the Baptism of the Lord. It pauses for Lent, Triduum, and Eastertide, and resumes after Pentecost. The sequence continues until the end of the liturgical year, even when it is interrupted by observances such as the Solemnity of Corpus Christi.
During Ordinary Time, the lectionary strives to give us a systematic "survey" of most of the books of the Bible.
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In the Sunday cycle, we work chronologically through one of the three synoptic ("same perspective") gospels each year: Matthew in Year A, Mark in Year B, and Luke in Year C. The Gospel of John is used to supplement the Gospel of Mark in Year B of the Sunday cycle. The second readings systematically sample the entire 21-book corpus of New Testament epistles over the three-year cycle.
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In the Daily cycle, we work chronologically through all three synoptic gospels each year: Mark in Weeks 1 - 9, Matthew in Weeks 10 - 21, and Luke in Weeks 22 - 34. The first readings in Year I focus on Old Testament history and the longer New Testament epistles; in Year II, the focus is on the pre-exilic prophets and the shorter New Testament epistles.
The other lectionary selections are not as systematic. On Sundays, the first reading is a passage in the Old Testament that covers a related theme in the gospel passage. In both the Sunday and daily cycles, the psalm is in response to the first reading.
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This concludes page 1 of 40 in our Lectionary Guide. For a comprehensive reading of the entire guide, we suggest going next to Salvation History.
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