Grade for 7th Day of the Octave of Christmas

[allan-farrell]

Hi John,

I really appreciate the work you and the team are doing on the liturgical calendar. It's a great resource.

I've been working with the liturgical calendar json data for Canada using this endpoint:

FEED

I noticed that for the 7th Day of the Octave of Christmas on Dec 31,2024 that the grade of this liturgical_event shows in the JSON as 0.

But when examining the code LitGrade.php a weekday in the octave of Christmas should be a grade 4? Am I misinterpreting something here? Or is this a bug?

I also noticed that in the same JSON feed, St. Sylvester shows up as a grade 1, instead of an optional memorial Grade 2.

Thanks,

Allan

[JohnRDOrazio]

Thank you for bringing this up, this will take some thinking. Theoretically, the days of the Octave of Christmas have the same rank as Feasts, so they would fall under the grade 4 category. However, seeing that:

1. on these days other feasts are allowed, and the Feasts "win" over the Christmas weekday, i.e. in a liturgical Ordo the Feast of St. Stephen would be displayed whereas the Christmas weekday of the Octave would not, same for Feast of Saint John the Evangelist, and Feast of the Holy Innocents
2. on these days memorials can be observed as commemorations, e.g. Saint Sylvester; and such commemorations should not be suppressed by the weekday of the Octave of Christmas

and considering that the grade property is a logical comparison which determines which liturgical events "win", such that:

1. an event with a grade value of 4 (= FEAST) would compete with another event with a grade of 4 (= FEAST)
2. an event with a grade value of 4 (= FEAST) would suppress an event with a lower grade value (3 = MEMORIAL, 2 = MEMORIAL_OPT, 1 = COMMEMORATION, 0 = WEEKDAY)

in order to prevent the weekday of the Octave of Christmas from competing with other Feasts or suppressing other memorials / optional memorials / commemorations, we have to keep it at a value of 0 = WEEKDAY so that it will be suppressed by a FEAST, but it will live alongside a COMMEMORATION.

I believe this is the reasoning behind setting it logically to a value of 0 = WEEKDAY.

When it comes to grade values of 2 = MEMORIAL_OPT or 1 = COMMEMORATION, the distinction that is made here is that :

The weekdays of High Advent (17-24 December), the days of the Octave of Christmas and weekdays of Lent outrank all memorials, but a memorial that falls on such a day (except Ash Wednesday and Holy Week, and of course Sundays, solemnities and feasts) can be commemorated by having its collect entirely replace the collect of the Mass, and just the collect, with nothing else being done for the memorial (see GIRM 355).

So even though St. Sylvester is an optional memorial (MEMORIAL_OPT = 2), since it falls during the Octave of Christmas, it is observed as a COMMEMORATION = 1.

One of the main purposes of the calculations done in this API, is to offer a feed from which a liturgical Ordo or a pocket size liturgical calendar booklet could be produced. Also when producing a web calendar the data will be displayed correctly. If you look at the example web calendar at https://litcal.johnromanodorazio.com/examples.php?example=PHP (for example choosing Canada in the nation dropdown then clicking on GENERATE ROMAN CALENDAR), you will see that St. Stephen correctly shows as a Feast on Dec. 26th 2025, Saint John the Evangelist correctly shows as a Feast on Dec. 27th 2025, The Holy Innocents correctly shows as a Feast on Dec. 28th 2025, and St. Sylvester correctly shows as an optional memorial observed as a commemoration on Dec. 31st 2025 while living alongside the 7th Day of the Octave of Christmas. Looking at the liturgical Ordo for the Diocese of Rome, I see that the weekdays of the Octave of Christmas aren't specifically displayed as FEAST, but if we were to set the grade property to a value of 4 = FEAST, then they would display as FEAST in the web calendar or in a printed Ordo (unless we suppress the display value via the grade_display property). But keeping the value at 0 = WEEKDAY seems to solve all the issues.