Ordinary Time

Ordinary Time (Latin: Tempus per annum) is the part of the liturgical year in the liturgy of the Roman Rite, which falls outside the two great seasons of Christmastide and Eastertide, or their respective preparatory seasons of Advent and Lent. Ordinary Time thus includes the days between Christmastide and Lent, and between Eastertide and Advent. The liturgical color assigned to Ordinary Time is green. The last Sunday of Ordinary Time is the Solemnity of Christ the King.

The word "ordinary" as used here comes from the ordinal numerals by which the weeks are identified or counted, from the 1st week of Ordinary Time in January to the 34th week that begins toward the end of November.

In the ordinary form of the Roman Rite, the last day of Christmas Time is the Sunday after the Solemnity of the Epiphany, or the Sunday after January 6 in places where Epiphany is moved to always occur on a Sunday. Ordinary Time begins the following Monday, and the weekdays that follow are reckoned as belonging to the first week of Ordinary Time. The Feast of the Baptism of the Lord is usually celebrated on the last day of Christmas Time, but if it is displaced to Monday due to Epiphany being celebrated on January 7 or 8, the Feast of the Baptism falls in Ordinary Time instead.

Because Ordinary Time begins on a Monday, there is no day called the "First Sunday in Ordinary Time". Instead, the lowest-numbered Sunday is called the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time. This block of Ordinary Time continues through the Tuesday that immediately precedes Ash Wednesday.

Ordinary Time resumes on the Monday after the Solemnity of Pentecost. The two Sundays following Pentecost are the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity and the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, which despite being part of Ordinary Time, are not numbered. In regional calendars where Whitmonday is a Day of Obligation, Ordinary Time and the use of the liturgical colour Green may begin on the following Tuesday.

The last day of Ordinary Time is the day before the First Sunday of Advent. The last Sunday of Ordinary Time is the Solemnity of Christ the King, with the Sunday before that being the Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, with the ordinal numbers counting backwards from that point.

Due to the configuration of the calendar year, Ordinary Time may have a total of either 33 or 34 weeks. As a mnemonic, if the First Sunday of Advent is in November, the previous liturgical year's Ordinary Time will have 33 weeks. If it falls on December 2 or 3, it will have 34 weeks. However, if it falls on December 1, the previous year's Ordinary Time will have 34 weeks only when it is a leap year. In a year where Ordinary Time has 33 weeks, the omitted week is the one between the weeks immediately surrounding Lent and Easter Time, which varies with the date of Easter. This is because the weeks always count forward from the first week at the beginning of Ordinary Time, and separately backwards from the thirty-fourth week at the end of Ordinary Time.

The decision to treat the whole of Ordinary Time as a unit led to abandonment of the previous terminology, whereby the Sundays of the first period were called Sundays after Epiphany and those of the second period Sundays after Pentecost.