Tag: hymns

Learning the Victimae paschali for Easter

Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet – Learning the Victimae paschali for Easter

In only a couple of weeks now we will have reached Easter. As well as getting back the Gloria and the Alleluias (still sadly shorn of their exclamation mark), there is a particular extra bit of liturgy for Easter Sunday Mass.

It comes after the Second Reading and before the Alleluia-before-the-Gospel. It is of course the Victimae paschali. This is one of the “Sequences” that occur at various points in the Church’s year. Others include the Veni, Sancte Spiritus at Pentecost, and the Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem at Corpus Christi, which is where Panis angelicus comes from.

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Light in the darkness: hymns for Ordinary Time

Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet – Light in the darkness: hymns for Ordinary Time.

We are roughly in the middle of the first section of Ordinary Time in the Church’s year at the moment, the first of the two sequences of Sundays that can be expanded or contracted to make sure that the big dates fall at the right time.

The readings in them can be sequential from Sunday to Sunday; the Gospel usually is, but the First and Second readings can dodge around a bit, and the Responsorial Psalm is a reaction to the First Reading, so that too can come from anywhere (including the odd canticle). This first batch of Ordinary Time, after Christmas, before Lent, is much shorter than the second one (after Pentecost, before Advent), and this year it has only five Sundays, with an early Easter; but because the First Sunday of Ordinary Time is always overtaken by the Baptism of the Lord, the count starts at two. And it’s Year A, so the Gospels are mostly Matthew.

Choosing hymns for these Sundays is an interesting job.

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