Liturgical Time and the Cultural Artifact of the Weekend

In today’s second “On the Square” article, George Weigel offers one way the Catholic Church might “take a more determinedly countercultural stance” than it has in the recent past. “Let me suggest,” he writes in Countercultural Time ,

one specific, concrete way that Catholicism in America can begin to mount a campaign of resistance to the flattening-out of our common life by the ambient culture: Restore a distinctive sense of time to Catholic life, and do that by reforming the reform of the liturgical calendar.

He notes that in its official practices, “the Church has bent its sense of liturgical time to the imperial demands of that modern cultural artifact, the weekend,” and suggests ways of adjusting that cultural artifact to the Church’s sense of liturgical time.