When saints compete for feast days

October 12 marks the feast day of St. Carlo Acutis, his first feast day since being canonized earlier this year — though his feast will not be observed at Mass this year because it falls on a Sunday.

That date was chosen, as is typically the case with saints’ feast days, because it was the day Carlo died.

But what happens to the saints who already had an October 12 feast day? Do they get moved? Erased? Which saint gets mentioned in the liturgy of that day? And who makes that decision?

To answer these questions, The Pillar spoke with Fr. James Bradley, a canon law professor at The Catholic University of America.

That interview is below. It has been edited for length and clarity.

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What is the history of the Church celebrating saints’ feast days?

Well, she inherited some feast days from Roman society, so there are some things which the Church kept and sort of sanctified and canonized, as it were, in the earliest days. But of course, the fundamental foundations of the Christian calendar come from the life of Christ and of the saints alive at the time of the Gospels.

So, the shape of the Christian year really is rooted in the celebration of the Paschal Mystery of Easter, and everything kind of flows from that.

Saints are honored by the Church throughout the year. There are two kinds of parallel cycles. There’s what we call the “temporal cycle” and the “sanctoral cycle.” The temporal cycle is the one that depends on the feasts related to the life of Christ essentially, but also the seasons of the year, so Easter, Christmas, Lent, Advent, those sorts of things, and then the sanctoral cycle is really the cycle of the lives of the saints, which is commemorated as well.

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We typically celebrate saints’ feast days on the day that they died. But there are some exceptions. For example, St. John Paul II died in April, but his feast day is in October, on the day he began his pontificate.

What are the criteria for deciding when a person should get a feast day other than his or her death day? And who decides that?

The rule is that their feast day is their dies natalis — that is, the day of their birth, which actually is the day of their death, because that is their birth into eternal life.

But sometimes there will already be a very significant feast on that day, or there’ll be good reason for it to be at another time.

So for instance, John Henry Newman’s feast day is the 9th of October, which is the date of his reception into the Catholic Church, rather than the date of his death. There are several examples of that, but they are the exception that proves the rule. There’s generally a desire that people’s feasts will be kept on the anniversary of their death, but it’s not an absolute.

The Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments is the office of the Roman Curia that’s competent for liturgical matters in the Latin Church.

That dicastery, when someone is beatified or canonized, will help to assign them a feast day.

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There are more than 365 saints, so that means some days have more than one saint, correct?

Right, there can be overlapping feasts. And not all of those who have been canonized are actually celebrated in most places. Most days have multiple saints, and it might depend on a number of factors as to whether or not you ever celebrate them.

They’re all recorded in what’s called the Roman Martyrology. That book, it has a record, basically, of every blessed and saint in the life of the Church, and if you turn to a page of that, you’ll see sometimes 20 or 30 saints. Some of them will be kept universally, because they’ve been included in the universal calendar, which we call the General Roman Calendar, and others will be kept locally. So you might find that there are saints that are celebrated in France or in England or in India or in Australia which are local to there, but are not celebrated elsewhere.

Each nation has a national calendar, and then each diocese and each religious order also has a particular or proper calendar, and that’s for them.

Countries in Europe and elsewhere have got saints going back 2,000 years. In England there’s a huge number of Anglo-Saxon saints that most people have never heard of, and they’re not even kept in the national calendar in England, because the national calendar is itself quite full.

So you might even find a local saint who’s kept in one diocese, but not in all the others, because they were the bishop of that diocese, for instance. So they’re kept there, but they’re not necessarily kept everywhere. That’s certainly the case in Italy as well.

Traditionally the Blesseds, the Beati, are only kept locally - not even at the national level, but at the diocesan level.

In the United States, there’s been a practice for some years of keeping lots of people who are Blesseds in one part of the country across the whole of the country. But there does seem to be a move towards limiting that now.

And all of these calendars – for nations, dioceses and religious orders – are reviewed by the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, to make sure that all of these local calendars are in keeping with the General Roman Calendar and with the principles that govern the liturgical calendars universally.

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That all sounds complicated. Are those principles laid out somewhere?

Yes. They’re actually attached to the General Roman Calendar. If you look at that, you’ll see there’s what’s called a table of liturgical days, which is usually printed in missals when the calendar’s printed in a missal, and it lays out the various ranks of the days (solemnities, feasts, memorials).

So for instance, on the 25th of December we have Christmas Day and we have the Feast of Saint Anastasia. How do you know that you celebrate Christmas Day and not the Feast of Saint Anastasia? Well, because those two feasts overlap, but one has a higher rank than the other.

Now sometimes you will have two days that are of the same rank, and it’s then down to the priest to decide which one he’s going to keep. The 17th of September even has two Doctors of the Church – Saint Hildegard of Bingen and Saint Robert Bellarmine, two wonderful characters. You might think in a parish, oh, well, we’ve got two Masses, we’ll keep one at each Mass, or we’ll choose one over the other because of some particular reason or what have you. But usually it’s clear who you’re going to celebrate each day.

And you might find that if you’re in a parish dedicated to, let’s say, Bernard of Clairvaux, you’re going to be celebrating that as a solemnity rather than as a memorial. If you’re in a diocese that has Saint Edmund Campion as the patron, then you’re going to be celebrating that at a higher rank than other dioceses who don’t have him as a patron.

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Sometimes, alongside the daily Mass readings, you see the phrase “optional memorial” listed for a particular saint. What makes it optional?

An optional memorial is exactly what it says. It’s an option, and if you choose it, it becomes a memorial. So you treat it like a memorial if you’re going to celebrate it, but you don’t have to [celebrate it at all.]

If a saint is an optional memorial in the calendar, and if there’s no devotion to that person within a given parish, then the pastor might just say, “Nobody knows who this person is. It’s not that they’re unimportant, it’s not that we can’t teach about it, but it would be better to maintain the regular cycle of readings and so on rather than break this up with a feast about some 19th century Italian missionary whom nobody’s heard of.”

The Church says, well, you can keep them if you want to, but you don’t have to.

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Has there ever been a case where a saint has an established feast day, but then it gets moved?

Oh there’s a few of them. The calendar reform in the 1960s moved a lot around. Saint Dominic’s feast moved, the feast of Saint Benedict moved, these big names for religious orders. Sometimes the religious orders will still keep them on their old feast day.

One that always sticks in my mind is Raymond of Peñafort, because he’s the patron saint of canon lawyers, and his feast day moved, and so there’s the old feast day and there’s the new feast day.

Sometimes, as well, a saint might have had more than one feast day in the liturgical calendar, particularly if their relics were transferred at some point. Saint Thomas Becket had the anniversary of his martyrdom and then the feast of the translation of his relics, which is when they were moved into Canterbury Cathedral.

Those sorts of things have generally been removed in the calendar reform and it’s been simplified. Saints don’t generally have more than one feast in the year, except for Saint John the Baptist, Saint Joseph, Our Lady, and obviously the Lord.

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There’s clearly a lot going on behind the scenes when a saint gets assigned a feast day. Is there anything else Catholics may not realize about saints and feast days?

Just because someone is canonized doesn’t mean that they’re going to end up in the General Roman Calendar, necessarily.

Even Doctors of the Church are not automatically on the General Roman Calendar. Saint John Henry Newman, for instance. He started off as a Blessed and was kept in England, but kept with different ranks. He was basically a memorial in England except in the Ordinariate, because he’s the patron of the Ordinariate, so there he was a feast.

He’ll be inserted in the General Roman Calendar after being made a Doctor of the Church. But that doesn’t happen automatically. Saint Hildegard of Bingen and Gregory of Narek were made Doctors of the Church, but were added to the General Roman Calendar later on.

It’s wonderfully geeky and technical really, and there’s a whole study of calendars and liturgical time and Christian feasts and so on. People dedicate their whole lives as liturgical scholars to that question. Heortology it’s called. It’s a wonderful thing.

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