Liturgical Calendar

To my surprise, my husband has decided to put his talents and knowledge of auto-cad and computers to good use in creating a liturgical calendar wheel for the upcoming year. The current liturgical year will be ending on Nov. 29, 2008. The calendar he is designing is similar to liturgical wheel calendars you can buy at www.ltp.org/ . His, of course, is less colorful than the ones you can buy, but will be more practical for our needs because he has left more space on each day for us to write in special events like birthdays, lector schedules, and our home school groups First Friday activities. One advantage, of dear hubby being a civil engineer, is he has a very large printer at the office where he can print a really big version of this liturgical calendar wheel. I am not so thrilled about the large calendar taking up so much space on the wall, however, I am excited that we will be more organized about celebrating the feasts days throughout the church year.

I was first introduced to the liturgical calendar wheel by the book A Year With God, Celebrating the Liturgical Year published by Little Way Press and distributed by Catholic Heritage Curricula. This book can be ordered at http://www.chcweb.com/ I believe it is written by Theresa A. Johnson. The reasoning behind the celebration of these wonderful feasts can be best summarized by the following quote from Pope Pius XI:

"...people are instructed in the truths of faith and brought to appreciate the inner joys of religion far more effectively by the annual celebration of our sacred mysteries than by any official pronouncement of the teaching of the Church. Such pronouncements usually reach only a few and the more learned amount the faithful: feasts reach them all. The Church's teaching affects the mind primarily; her feasts affect both mind and heart and have a salutary effect upon man's whole nature."



I think this is especially true for children. The more children attend Mass, hear about the heroic lives of the saints, and experience our rich Catholic Traditions and traditions, the more they come to understand the joy of being Catholic. I want my children to experience this more than I want them to memorize the names of dinosaurs, planets, or famous dates in history. If I can succeed at building a firm foundation of love for Christ, His Church, and His friends, the saints, then I will have given them the best gift I could ever give them, next to life itself.