The joyful seasons of Christmas and Epiphany are behind us, and we will soon enter the penitential season of Lent. The season of Septuagesima bridges the three weeks between the Epiphany Season and Lent. Dom Guéranger, in The Liturgical Year, tells us how the Church now gives us these three weeks to prepare for “…the solemn warning she is to give us, at the commencement of Lent, by marking our foreheads with ashes.”
We now also leave behind the joyful hymn, the Gloria, and the joyful word, Alleluia. The Gloria will be sung on Holy Thursday, and feast days, but the Alleluia will be strictly avoided until the mass of the Pascal Vigil. So, of course, we will refrain from singing hymns that contain the word Alleluia.
The hymns we choose during Septuagesima will generally have a penitential character, but we still have much to celebrate. So, for example, we will sing Immaculate Mary (with the Lourdes refrain) in honor of Our Lady of Lourdes, which feast we celebrated last week.Recall our rule of thumb that if the priest is wearing green, we will likely sing Mass XI. There is another rule of thumb: If the priest is wearing purple, we will usually sing Mass XVII. But it would be premature to sing Mass XVII during Septuagesima because Mass XVII is to be used for Lent and Advent. The book that gives us much guidance regarding the Liturgy, the Liber Usualis, doesn’t give us an option for the commons, prescribing Mass XI. So, we have the interesting case where the priest is wearing purple, but we are singing Mass XI – and of course, we will sing it without its Gloria.