The Ordered Weeks

Ordinary Time is the newest name in the Christian calendar for its oldest condition: the weeks in which nothing in particular is being prepared for or celebrated, and the church simply keeps time. The Latin name given in the 1969 reform is tempus per annum, the time through the year, and the English rendering invites a misreading the liturgists have spent decades correcting: ordinary here is the ordinary of ordinal numbers, the counted and ordered weeks, not a claim that the season is unremarkable.

There are thirty three or thirty four such weeks in a year, kept in two unequal stretches. The first begins after the feast of the Baptism of the Lord and runs until Lent opens on Ash Wednesday; because Easter moves, this stretch varies most in length. The second and much longer stretch begins after Pentecost and runs to the eve of Advent, carrying the church through summer and autumn. The counting is continuous across the interruption, the numbered weeks resuming after Pentecost where the pre Lenten count left off, so the two stretches are one season wearing a gap. Before the reform the same weeks were counted as Sundays after Epiphany and Sundays after Pentecost; the 1969 calendar gathered them under a single name and gave the year's longest season, for the first time, an identity of its own.