According to tradition, the Wednesday after the 3rd Sunday of
Advent, shortly before the onset of astronomical winter time, marks the beginning
of Winter Ember Days. In the course of the post-conciliar liturgical ruptures,
the traditional dates were abandoned or left to the discretion of local
bishops' conferences. In Germany, Winter Ember Days moved to the week after the
first Sunday of Advent. No factual reason for this "shift" can be
discerned. It took place probably above all from desire to do "everything
differently," and to "self-determine" -- so it is in the long
run only consistent that the millennia-old custom so kindly detached from the
cosmic reference and made arbitrary was almost completely forgotten and got
lost.
In the "Schott Online," which we use here as a reference for the real
existing Novus Ordo, the Ember Days are also unmentioned in the week after the
1st Sunday of Advent. The liturgical features of the Ember Days days have
completely disappeared. Accordingly, the Ember Days days are currently only
noticed and celebrated in some form in a few parishes in Germany -- of course, with the great exception of the parishes and communities of tradition that use the
Missal of 1962 or previous editions.
In
fact, the Ember Days days are among the oldest heritage that the Church has
absorbed and reshaped from Judaism and pagan societies. The establishment of Ember
Days days is attributed to Pope Callistus (217-222) in the Liber Pontificalis,
which dates back to the 4th century; Pope Leo the Great (440-461), from whom
several Ember Days sermons have survived, traces their origin directly to the
apostles.
This is quite plausible insofar as there were already
comparable "marking days" for the transition between the seasons in
pre-Christian Roman tradition. It is a general human need, attested from the
pre-industrial epochs of many cultures, to accentuate and make conscious the
succession of the seasons through public worship.
Inasmuch as early cultures divided the year into four seasons, the number of four
such days or periods of prayer and celebration resulted from that division almost
"naturally." In Judaism, too, whose environment suggests a
different division of the year according to the climatic conditions of the Near
East, four fast days motivated by agriculture are already documented: in the
fourth, fifth seventh and tenth months (Zechariah 8:19). Pope Leo, in a homily
on Winter Ember Days, made the connection between thanksgiving and fasting
thus: "After the harvest is complete, it is fitting to offer due thanks to
the giver of all blessings by moderation of indulgence -- this draws us closer to
God and gives us the strength to better resist the temptations of the world,
for fasting has always been food for virtue."
Traditionally,
Ember Days days take place on the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday of each Ember week. Why is
Thursday missing? Why are there only three days of penance and prayer in the
second half of the week instead of four? One conjecture is that early Christians wanted to set
themselves apart consciously from Jewish fast days. The relationship of the
early Christianity to its Jewish roots and traditions is quite ambivalent. Some
things were taken over unproblematically, for example the seven-day week.
Others were deliberately changed: no longer is the weekly holiday the Sabbath, the Creator's day
of rest, but rather Sunday as the day of resurrection, the start of the new creation. The Jews,
especially the Pharisees, kept two fast days in the week: Tuesday and Thursday.
The Christians kept the tradition of two fast days but moved them to
Wednesday and Friday as the days when the Lord was betrayed and died on the
cross.
Unreflective
or even unchanged adoption of Jewish customs was considered reprehensible
"Judaizing" by the early Christians, who often saw themselves
threatened by syncretistic currents (and not only in Palestine). It is quite possible
that they therefore consciously avoided Thursday as a fast day and, on the
other hand, gladly turned the Sabbath or Saturday from a feast day into a fast day. Such inter-denominational quarrels are familiar: even in the 1950s, in
mixed-denominational areas of Germany, Catholics liked to hang up laundry
demonstratively in the garden on Reformation Day, while Protestants took their carpets outdoors to beat them on Corpus Christi. Resourceful minds always knew how to find
productive solutions to such problems: How does the pious Jew turn the Sabbath
into a holiday if he is not allowed to light a fire in the kitchen and also
finds himself hindered by many other regulations? Well -- for that there is the
Shabbos goy, a Christian from the neighborhood who comes into the house for a
small fee or three eggs and does there with a good conscience all that the
housewife is not allowed to do. The very pious on both sides also objected to
this...
Be
that as it may, Thursday is missing in the series of Ember Days. In the
traditional liturgy, the Masses of Ember Days in Advent are characterized by an
extraordinary richness of readings and chants -- especially Ember Saturday.
While Wednesday has only two readings in addition to the Gospel, this Saturday
has no less than 6 additional readings. Thus, in terms of the number of
readings, this day is second only to Easter with 12 readings.
According to Rupert von Deutz, there seem to have been originally 12 on the
Saturday of Ember Days in Advent, of which, however, already in his time only 6
were read. In addition, the Saturday Ember Days -- and especially the one in
Advent -- were preferred days for the conferral of Holy Orders in the Roman
Church since ancient times.
However,
where the liturgy is celebrated according to the traditional Missal, two different
traditions now compete with each other on the Ember Saturday of Advent: in
addition to the actual Ember Day Mass, there is also the Mass of the Blessed
Mother celebrated as the Rorate Mass, which is often preferred: both because only in the rarest cases is it possible to celebrate the original
Ember Day Mass as an ordination Mass, in accordance with its structure, and because the Rorate Mass, celebrated before dawn only by
candlelight, represents for many faithful an emotional highlight of the Church
year.
There
is nothing to be said against this. However, there is also a loss incurred: of all the Advent Masses, the Mass of Ember Saturday in Advent is the one that most strongly expresses the expectation of the
Lord. It is perhaps the most deeply rooted of all liturgies in the tradition of
the chosen people.
