Rogation Days

Authority level: Authoritative doctrine
Disciplinary status: Church discipline
Theological status: Theological synthesis
GuideThe entry combines Catholic doctrine about worship with approved liturgical discipline and theological explanation; the labels do not make every ceremonial norm irreformable.
Contents

Rogation Days is Days of public supplication and thanksgiving adapted by competent authority to local needs, traditionally associated with crops, human labor, and protection in adversity.

Rogation days, also known as Rogationtide, are days of prayer and fasting in Western Christianity. They are observed with processions and the Litany of the Saints. The so-called major rogation is held on 25 April;[4] the minor rogations are held on Monday to Wednesday preceding Ascension Thursday.[5] In the Ambrosian Rite minor rogations were celebrated on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday after Ascension, preparing to celebrate Pentecost. The word rogation comes from the Latin verb rogare, meaning "to ask", which reflects the beseeching of God for the appeasement of his anger and for protection from calamities.[6][7]

Rogation Sunday is celebrated on the fifth Sunday after Easter (also known as the sixth Sunday of Easter) in the Anglican tradition.[8][9] This day is also known in the Lutheran tradition as Rogate Sunday.[10]

Prayer for human and earthly needs

Rogation comes from the Latin for asking. Western Christians developed processions, litanies, fasting, and Masses of supplication for favorable seasons, the fruits of the earth, deliverance from calamity, and the blessing of human labor. The major rogation was associated with 25 April and minor rogations with the days before the Ascension in older Roman usage, though regional traditions varied.

The prayer is neither an attempt to control nature magically nor a relic limited to agricultural societies. Dependence on providence, responsible stewardship of creation, gratitude for work, concern for hunger, and intercession amid disaster remain urgent. Urban and industrial communities can express the same theological purpose in forms suited to their actual lives.

Current Roman discipline

The General Norms for the Liturgical Year retain Rogation and Ember Days while entrusting conferences of bishops to arrange their times and manner according to regional needs. Competent authority determines whether they last one or more days or recur during the year. The suitable Mass is selected from Masses and prayers for various needs and occasions.[1]

They are therefore not universally fixed holy days of obligation or fasting days under current Latin law. Particular law and approved local calendars must be consulted. Communities may preserve older processions or litanies when lawfully adapted, but private preference cannot impose an obsolete calendar or alter the liturgy on personal authority.[2]

Christian beginnings

The Christian major rogation replaced a pagan Roman procession known as Robigalia, at which a dog was sacrificed to propitiate Robigus, the deity of agricultural disease.[11][6] The practitioners observing Robigalia asked Robigus for protection of their crops from wheat rust.[6]

The minor Rogation days were introduced around AD 470 by Mamertus, bishop of Vienne, and eventually adopted elsewhere. Their observance was ordered by the Council of Orleans in 511, and though the practice was spreading in Gaul during the 7th century, it was not officially adopted into the Roman rite until the reign of Pope Leo III (died 816).[12]

The faithful typically observed the Rogation days by fasting and abstinence in preparation to celebrate the Ascension, and farmers often had their crops blessed by a priest at this time.[13] Violet vestments are worn at the rogation litany and its associated Mass, regardless of what colour is worn at the ordinary liturgies of the day.[6]

A common feature of Rogation days in former times was the ceremony of beating the bounds, in which a procession of parishioners, led by the minister, churchwarden, and choirboys, would proceed around the boundary of their parish and pray for its protection in the forthcoming year. This was also known in the northern parts of England as 'Gang-day' or 'gan week', after the old English name for going or walking.[14] This was also a feature of the original Roman festival, when revellers would walk to a grove five miles from the city to perform their rites.[11] Thomas Johnson (1633), speaking of the birch tree, mentions another name: Cross-week: "It serveth well to the decking up of houses and banquetting-rooms, for places of pleasure, and for beautifying of streets in the Crosse or Gang Week, and such like."[15]

In the British Isles

The Rogation Day ceremonies are thought to have arrived in the British Isles in the 7th century.

The oldest known Sarum text regarding Rogation Days is dated from around 1173 to 1220.[14] In it, celebrations in the south of England are described, in which processions were led by members of the congregation carrying banners which represented various biblical characters. At the head of the procession was the dragon, representing Pontius Pilate, which would be followed by a lion, representing Christ. After this there would be images of saints carried by the rest of the congregation.[16] Many torches were present at each procession, weighing between 42 lb (19 kg) and 27 lbs (12 kg), which were bought by the church and parishioners jointly.[17]

Sarum texts from the 13th and 15th centuries show that the dragon was eventually moved to the rear of the procession on the vigil of the Ascension, with the lion taking the place at the front. Illustrations of the procession from the early 16th century show that the arrangements had been changed yet again, this time also showing bearers of reliquaries and incense.[16]

During the reign of King Henry VIII, Rogation processions were used as a way to assist crop yields, with a notable number of the celebrations taking place in 1543 when there were prolonged rains.

During the reign of King Edward VI, the Crown having taken much of the Church's holdings within the country, liturgical ceremonies were not officially condoned or recognized as an official part of worship. However, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I the celebrations were explicitly mentioned in the royal reformation, allowing them to resume as public processions.[18]

Rogation processions continued in the post-Reformation Church of England much as they had before, and Anglican priests were encouraged to bring their congregations together for inter-parish processions. At specific intervals, clerics were to remind their congregations to be thankful for their harvests. Psalms 103 and 104 were sung, and people were reminded of the curses the Bible ascribed to those who violated agricultural boundaries. The processions were not mandatory, but were at the discretion of the local minister, and were also ascribed more importance when a public right of way needed to be protected from agricultural or other expansion.[18]

The marches would follow prescribed routes, with York and Coventry being unique in their following royal entries.[19] On other routes, altars were erected at certain locations where antiphons were sung.[20]

Any Roman Catholic imagery or icons were banned from the processions. The then Archdeacon of Essex, Edmund Grindal, besought the church explicitly to label the tradition as a perambulation of the parish boundaries (beating the bounds), further to distance it from the Catholic liturgy. In the book Second Tome of Homelys, a volume containing officially sanctioned homilies of the Elizabethan church, it was made clear that the English Rogation was to remember town and other communal boundaries in a social and historical context, with extra emphasis on the stability gained from lawful boundary lines.[18]

For years after Rogation Days were recognized, the manner in which they were observed in reality was very different from the official decree. Even before religious sensibilities turned towards the puritanical, there were concerns about the lack of piety at such events.[21] While it was officially ordered that the entire congregation attend, bishops began urging their priests to invite only older and more pious men. This, they believed, would stop the drunken revelry. Royal Injunctions concerning the practice were reinterpreted to restrict and regulate participants of the festivities.[18] Robert Herrick penned a piece to capture the mood of the celebrations before their repression:

Dearest, bury me Under that Holy-oak, or Gospel Tree Where (though thou see'st not) thou may'st think upon Me, when you yearly go'st Procession.

In London, Rogation Days, just like Easter or Hocktide, were times when begging was "legitimate" for the period of celebration.[22] Though not widely celebrated in the modern Church of England, the holiday is still observed in some areas.[23]

In the Americas

Catholic

The reform of the Liturgical Calendar for Roman Catholics in 1969 delegated the establishment of Rogation Days, along with Ember Days, to the episcopal conferences.[24] Their observance in the Latin Church subsequently declined, but the observance has revived somewhat since Pope John Paul II allowed Rogation days as a permitted, but not mandated, observance.[23] For those Catholics who continue to celebrate Mass according to the General Roman Calendar of 1960 or earlier, the Rogation Days are still kept, unless a higher ranking feast would occur on the day.[25]

Lutheran

The Rogation Days (known as Rogationtide) are the three days prior to Ascension Thursday.[26] In Lutheranism, there are liturgies for "the Procession, propers, and Litany for the Days of Rogation".[27] Fasting, as well as abstinence from meat, is enjoined during the Rogation days.[28]

Anglican

The new, Protestant version of the Rogation days became such a fixture in Church life that the tradition was carried over to the English churches across the British Empire, including to the Americas by British colonists in Bermuda, Jamaica, Barbados, Virginia and South Carolina.[29] Rogation days continue as an optional observance in the Episcopal Church,[30] and in Anglican Provinces around the world. Although early Rogation celebrations were associated with rural life, agriculture and fishing, the Book of Common Prayer in many jurisdictions has been expanded to include propers for commerce and industry and the stewardship of creation, as well as a fruitful season, and rubrics were added for their use.[31]

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

Days of prayer, and formerly also of fasting, instituted by the Church to appease God's anger at man's transgressions, to ask protection in calamities, and to obtain a good and bountiful harvest, known in England as "Gang Days" and "Cross Week", and in Germany as Bittage, Bittwoche, Kreuzwoche. The Rogation Days were highly esteemed in England and King Alfred's laws considered a theft committed on these days equal to one committed on Sunday or a higher Church Holy Day. Their celebration continued even to the thirteenth year of Elizabeth, 1571, when one of the ministers of the Established Church inveighed against the Rogation processions, or Gang Days, of Cross Week. The ceremonial may be found in the Council of Clovesho (Thorpe, Ancient Laws, I, 64; Hefele, Conciliengeschichte, III, 564).[3]

The Rogation Days are the 25th of April, called Major, and the three days before the feast of the Ascension, called Minor. The Major Rogation, which has no connexion with the feast of St. Mark (fixed for this date much later) seems to be of very early date and to have been introduced to counteract the ancient Robigalia, on which the heathens held processions and supplications to their gods. St. Gregory the Great (d. 604) regulated the already existing custom. The Minor Rogations were introduced by St. Mamertus, Bishop of Vienne, and were afterwards ordered by the Fifth Council of Orleans, which was held in 511, and then approved by Leo III (795-816). This is asserted by St. Gregory of Tours in "Hist. Franc.", II, 34, by St. Avitus of Vienne in his "Hom. de Rogat." (P.L., LVIII, 563), by Ado of Vienne (P. L., CXXIII, 102), and by the Roman Martyrology. Sassi, in "Archiepiscopi Mediolanenses", ascribes their introduction at an earlier date to St. Lazarus. This is also held by the Bollandist Henschen in "Acta SS.", II, Feb., 522. The liturgical celebration now consists in the procession and the Rogation Mass. For 25 April the Roman Missal gives the rubric: "If the feast of St. Mark is transferred, the procession is not transferred. In the rare case of 25 April being Easter Sunday [1886, 1943], the procession is held not on Sunday but on the Tuesday following".

The order to be observed in the procession of the Major and Minor Rogation is given in the Roman Ritual, title X, ch. iv. After the antiphon "Exurge Domine", the Litany of the Saints is chanted and each verse and response is said twice. After the verse "Sancta Maria" the procession begins to move. If necessary, the litany may be repeated, or some of the Penitential or Gradual Psalms added. For the Minor Rogations the "Ceremoniale Episcoporum", book II, ch. xxxii, notes: "Eadem serventur sed aliquid remissius". If the procession is held, the Rogation Mass is obligatory, and no notice is taken of whatever feast may occur, unless only one Mass is said, for then a commemoration is made of the feast. An exception is made in favour of the patron or titular of the church, of whom the Mass is said with a commemoration of the Rogation. The colour used in the procession and Mass is violet. The Roman Breviary gives the instruction: "All persons bound to recite the Office, and who are not present at the procession, are bound to recite the Litany, nor can it be anticipated".

ROCK, The Church of Our Fathers, III (London, 1904), 181; DUCHESNE, Chr. Worship (tr. London, 1904), 288; BINTERIM, Denkwurdigkeiten; AMBERGER, Pastoraltheologie, II, 834; VAN DER STEPPEN, Sacra Liturgia, IV, 405; NILLES, Kalendarium Manuale (Innsbruck, 1897).

FRANCIS MERSHMAN

References

  1. 1.General Instruction of the Roman Missal, 373 — Competence of the bishop to establish days of prayer and penitential observance
  2. 2.Sacrosanctum Concilium — Vatican II's constitution on the liturgy, sacred music, art, and furnishings
  3. 3.1913 Catholic Encyclopedia: Rogation Days
  4. 4.In the rare circumstance of Easter Sunday falling on 25 April, the major rogation is transferred to the Tuesday after Easter (cf. Code of Rubrics of 1960, no. 80); this will next occur in 2038.
  5. 5.Reff, Daniel T. (2005). Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New. Cambridge University Press. p. 100. ISBN 9781139442787.
  6. 6.[6.2][6.3][6.4]Dues, Greg (1993). Catholic Customs & Traditions: A Popular Guide. Twenty-Third Publications. pp. 39. ISBN 9780896225152. Robigalia.
  7. 7.Mershman 1912.
  8. 8.Rogation Days: A Rookie Anglican Guide
  9. 9.A Table of the Movaeble Feasts, www.churchofengland.org
  10. 10.Sutton, J., What is Rogate Sunday?, Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church, Terre Haute, published 5 May 2018, accessed 24 September 2023
  11. 11.[11.2]Burriss, Eli Edward (1928). "Some Survivals of Magic in Roman Religion". The Classical Journal. 24 (2). The Classical Association of the Middle West and South: 112–123. JSTOR 3289524.
  12. 12.Cook, Albert Stanburrough (1926). "Augustine's Journey from Rome to Richborough". Speculum. 1 (4): 375–397. doi:10.2307/2847160. JSTOR 2847160. S2CID 162451684.
  13. 13.Shepherd, John (1801). A critical and practical elucidation of the Book of common prayer, and administration of the sacraments, and other rites and ceremonies of the Church. Oxford University.
  14. 14.[14.2]Houseman, Michael (1998). "Painful Places: Ritual Encounters with One's Homelands" (PDF). The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 4 (3): 447–467. doi:10.2307/3034156. JSTOR 3034156.
  15. 15.Brand, Ellis & Hazlitt 1905.
  16. 16.[16.2]Liszka, Thomas R. (2002). "The Dragon in the "South English Legendary": Judas, Pilate, and the "A(1)" Redaction". Modern Philology. 100 (1): 50–59. doi:10.1086/493149. JSTOR 1215582. S2CID 161491639.
  17. 17.Pearson, Charles Buchanan (1878). "Some Account of Ancient Churchwarden Accounts of St. Michael's, Bath". Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. 7: 309–329. doi:10.2307/3677891. JSTOR 3677891.
  18. 18.[18.2][18.3][18.4]Davenport, Edwin (1996). "Elizabethan England's Other Reformation of Manners". ELH. 63 (2): 255–278. doi:10.1353/elh.1996.0015. JSTOR 30030221. S2CID 162365937.
  19. 19.Reynolds, Roger E. (2000). "The Drama of Medieval Liturgical Processions". Revue de Musicologie. 86 (1): 127–142. doi:10.2307/947285. JSTOR 947285.
  20. 20.Zika, Charles (1988). "Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany". Past & Present (118): 25–64. doi:10.1093/past/118.1.25. JSTOR 650830.
  21. 21.Stilgoe, John R. (1976). "Jack·o'·lanterns to Surveyors: The Secularization of Landscape Boundaries". Environmental Review. 1 (1). Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History: 14–16 and 18–30. doi:10.2307/3984295. JSTOR 3984295. S2CID 147330346.
  22. 22.Hitchcock, Tim (2005). "Begging on the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London" (PDF). Journal of British Studies. 44 (3): 478–498. doi:10.1086/429704. hdl:2299/33. JSTOR 429704.
  23. 23.[23.2]Melton, J. Gordon (2011-09-13). Religious Celebrations: An Encyclopedia of Holidays, Festivals, Solemn Observances, and Spiritual Commemorations. Vol. 1. Abc-Clio. p. 749. ISBN 9781598842050.
  24. 24.Pope Paul VI, General Norms for the Liturgical Year and Calendar (PDF), p. 11
  25. 25."Liturgical Calendar". Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary. Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  26. 26.Brooks, John (12 May 2000). "Christians Reflect on Water, Seeds, Soil During 'Rogation Days'". Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Retrieved 4 July 2025.
  27. 27."Rogation Days". Logos Lutheran Church. Retrieved 4 July 2025.
  28. 28."Fasting Guidelines" (PDF). Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church. p. 3. Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 June 2020. Retrieved 5 July 2025.
  29. 29.Beasley, Nicholas M. (2007). "Ritual Time in British Plantation Colonies, 1650-1780". Church History. 76 (3). Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church History: 541–568. doi:10.1017/S0009640700500572. JSTOR 27645033. S2CID 164181942.
  30. 30.Book of Common Prayer (Online), p.18
  31. 31."Rogation Days", The Episcopal Church