The Liturgical Year — Every Season, Fully Lived
Lent, Advent, Easter, Christmas — the rhythm of the Church year. Key dates, fasting rules, daily prayers, and devotional guides for every season.
The Church keeps its own calendar, and it does not run from January to December. The year opens with Advent, moves through Christmas, Lent, the Triduum and Easter, and returns to Ordinary Time. AngelGuard publishes the dates for each season, the fasting and observance rules, and how to keep them.
The whole calendar in one place
Today’s season and feast, every movable date for the next ten years, and every feast of this year by month — worked out from Easter rather than typed, so it never goes stale.
Open the liturgical calendarCounting to one date rather than reading the year? Days until Easter.
The seasons and feasts
Lent
The forty days the Church walks toward Easter
Ash Wednesday
The day the Church marks you with dust and tells you the truth
Holy Week
The eight days the whole year turns on
Easter
Not a day the Church celebrates, a season fifty days long
Advent
Four weeks of waiting, kept on purpose
Christmas
A season, not an afternoon
Pentecost
The day the Church was sent out
The Epiphany
The feast that opens Christmas outward to everyone else
The Assumption of Mary
The oldest Marian feast in the Church, and the one that says where the body ends up
All Saints' Day
The feast for the enormous majority of the saints, the ones nobody ever canonised
All Souls' Day
The day the Church prays for its dead, and the reason Catholics do that at all
The Immaculate Conception
The feast almost everyone misunderstands, including about whose conception it is
Good Friday
The one day of the year with no Mass anywhere in the world
The Holy Guardian Angels
The feast this whole site is named for, and the one thing almost everyone gets wrong about it
Holy Days of Obligation
Ten days in the universal law, a different number where you live, and the reason that is not a contradiction
Christ the King
The newest major feast in the calendar, and it was made in answer to something specific
Divine Mercy Sunday
Where the feast is Church law, where it is private revelation, and why the difference matters
Palm Sunday
The one Sunday that begins with a parade and ends with an execution
The Exaltation of the Holy Cross
The feast that treats an execution device as a trophy
When does the Church's year begin?
On the First Sunday of Advent, which falls on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and so lands in late November or early December. That is the Church's New Year, and it is why Advent is the first season rather than a run-up to one. The year then moves through Christmas, Ordinary Time, Lent, the Easter Triduum, the fifty days of Easter to Pentecost, and back into Ordinary Time until Advent comes round again.
Why do the dates move every year?
Because Easter does, and almost everything else is fixed to it. Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, a rule settled in the fourth century to keep it anchored to Passover. Ash Wednesday is forty-six days before it, Pentecost fifty days after, and the whole Lent and Easter block slides with it between late March and late April. Christmas and the saints' feasts, by contrast, sit on fixed calendar dates.
Which days do Catholics actually have to keep?
Fewer than most people assume. In the Latin Church there are two days of both fasting and abstinence, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and every Friday of Lent is a day of abstinence from meat. Sundays and the holy days of obligation carry the obligation to attend Mass, and which days those are varies by country. Everything else, including giving something up for Lent, is custom rather than requirement. Each page here states the rules for its own season and says plainly where local practice differs.