Liturgical colors
Catholic priests change color with the calendar: violet for waiting, white for feasts, red for fire and blood.
- Described
- Innocent III (as cardinal), 1190s
- Fixed
- Missal of Pius V, 1570
Walk into a Catholic church through the year and the priest's vestments change color with the season. In today's Roman rite, white (or gold on big days) marks Christmas, Easter and feasts; red marks Pentecost, Good Friday and the martyrs; green fills the long stretch called Ordinary Time; violet marks Advent and Lent, the seasons of waiting and penance. Black is allowed for funerals (see colors of mourning).
The scheme is younger than the church. Colors varied from place to place until the 1190s, when Lotario dei Segni, soon to be Pope Innocent III, wrote a treatise on the Mass describing white, red, black and green in Rome. Violet gradually replaced black for Advent and Lent, and in 1570 Pope Pius V's Missal fixed the sequence for the whole Roman church.
Two Sundays get a surprise: rose. On Gaudete Sunday in Advent and Laetare Sunday in Lent, the halfway points, violet lightens to rose, as if the season exhales. Each color carries meaning: white for joy and purity, red for the fire of the Spirit and the blood of martyrs, green for growth and hope, violet for penance. Anglican, Lutheran and Orthodox churches use related but different schemes.
Violet's place echoes the long story of purple and power, and black's the colors of mourning. Like heraldry and alchemy, it's a code in which each hue means one thing, so anyone who knows it can read the calendar off a robe.
Swatches
- White · Christmas, Easter, feasts
- Red · Pentecost, martyrs
- Green · Ordinary Time
- Violet · Advent, Lent
- Rose · Gaudete, Laetare
- Black · funerals
Colors
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'Church year: Liturgical colours'.
- General Instruction of the Roman Missal (2002), §§345–347.
- Thurston, H. (1910). 'Liturgical Colours', Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8.
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