The “Ascension Sunday” absurdity

ROME. I missed the Ascension again this year, not from any slovenliness or laxity on my part, but because I was in Rome: the center of the Catholic world.

Why, you ask? Because in the Borgo district where I stay, the Ascension has been moved to the following Sunday (as in the rest of Italy), while three hundred yards up the Borgo Pio, in Vatican City, the Ascension is celebrated on Thursday, where it belongs.

Thus, on Thursday, May 14, I attended Mass for Thursday of the Sixth Week of Easter at the Church of S. Maria in Traspontina, and three days later, at the North American College (whose magnificent Sunday liturgies I attend whenever possible), we celebrated the Seventh Sunday of Easter–for the College is on extraterritorial Vatican property and follows the Vatican’s liturgical calendar. So, no Ascension 2026 Mass for George.

This is, frankly, absurd.

It is biblically absurd, for the texts do not affirm that the Lord ascended into heaven “on the forty-third day,” but on the fortieth day. That is a calendrical notation rich with biblical and spiritual meaning, as the forty days between Easter and the Ascension parallel the forty days of the Lord’s fast in the desert before his public ministry, the experience that sets the temporal rhythm of the forty days of Lent, which then sets the stage for Easter.

It is pastorally counterproductive, because Christians live, or ought to live, as if they were in a different time zone: the time zone declared by the Lord at the beginning of the Lord’s public ministry, when he proclaimed that the kingdom of God is at hand, now. It is the time zone presaged in the Resurrection, which made the early Christians of Jewish origin do the previously unthinkable–shift their holy day, their sabbath, to Sunday. It is the time zone of the time-beyond-time that is affirmed in the Ascension, when the glorified human nature of Christ enters the eternal life of the thrice-holy God, the Trinity.

For the Church to accommodate its liturgical calendar to the conventions of the secular world is to weaken our distinctive sense of Catholic identity. Catholics are called to be a culture-reforming counterculture. To be that, we ought to experience the patterns of mundane, worldly time differently than the world we are seeking to convert. We have to live, concretely and specifically, in a different time-zone, if we are to be living examples to others that this world is the antechamber to the really real world, which is life in the presence of the God who created time and then entered time to redeem it.

It is one of the mysteries of the pontificate of Benedict XVI that he didn’t address this absurdity. Joseph Ratzinger was a lifelong scholar of the liturgy who knew that the “spirit of the liturgy” (as he styled a book) takes us out of mundane time into the time-beyond-time, precisely so that we can be cooperators with grace in redeeming the time.

So why didn’t he fix this Ascension Thursday/Sunday mess by mandating the annual celebration of the Ascension where it belongs: on Thursday of the sixth week of Easter, ten days before Pentecost? (As for the alleged difficulties that some would have in meeting the obligation to attend Mass on the Ascension if it occurred during the week, it has always been clear that, should the Sunday or holy day obligation of participation in the Eucharist pose an exceptional burden, the obligation is lifted.) Perhaps Benedict’s second successor could do something about this. I hope so.

There are too few ways in which Catholics visibly manifest their countercultural difference today. Making clear that we live in a different time-zone by fixing the Ascension where it belongs–thereby helping equip the saints for their culture-reforming mission–is a no-brainer. Let it be done, soon.

Then we can consider moving the solemnities of the Epiphany and Corpus Christi back where they belong, too.

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