The cal-catholic package is intended to be a drop-in extension to Ed Reingold's calendar package in emacs. It calculates each day's Roman Catholic liturgical data and can be extended to present all sorts of other daily information, such as Mass readings and prayers, the Liturgy of the Hours, the Roman Martyrology, etc.

cal-catholic is a tottering kludge tower. The current version is pretty much a rough initial sketch of what I intend to do, and will be thrown away in favor of a clearer, more efficient version after I play with the problem a while.

It's FREE of course, as in free speech and free beer, and it's distributed under the GNU General Public License.

What's new?

• billw 31 Jan 2003: beta release of my hacked-up, slightly-documented development version; see the blog for details.
• billw 30 Nov 2002: new celebrations and bug fixes; see the blog for details.
• billw 27 Sep 2002: bug fixes, new cal-catholic blog.
• billw 15May01: Initial beta release. Implements all days of the liturgical calendar.

What might be new someday?

• Use the appropriate seasonal and sanctoral calendar for each date. For example,
  • dates before 1970 should use the old Latin-rite calendar
  • a saint's commemoration should not appear before it was added to the calendar. Aug 14 should not be the commemoration of St. Maximilian Kolbe in, say, 1944.
• Add other daily information as mentioned at the top of the page.

You can download the latest stable version of the package here:

• roman-calendar.tar.gz

• roman-calendar-beta-2003-01-31.tar.gz

• Download the sources, uncompress and untar. This works for me:

  gunzip -qc roman-calendar.tar.gz | tar xvf -

  This will create a directory "roman-calendar" containing the source files.
• You'll need this line (at least) in your ~/.emacs:

  (add-hook 'diary-display-hook 'fancy-diary-display)

• Put the following lines in your ~/.emacs file to add the directory to your Emacs load path and load the package. This works for me; change the path name to point to your copy of "roman-calendar":

  (add-to-list 'load-path "/mnt/disk2/billw/emacs/emacs-lisp-21/roman-calendar")
  (require 'cal-catholic)

• Evaluate those lines in your ~/.emacs: put your cursor after each closing paren and type 'C-x C-e'.
• Put the following line in your 'diary-file' (see 'C-h v diary-file'):

  &%%(diary-catholic-date)

• Invoke the calendar via 'M-x calendar' and type 'd'. You should see something like this:

  Tuesday, May 15, 2001
  =====================
  Optional Memorial: Saint Isidore the Farmer

Gnus interface

Add this code to your ~/.gnus file in order to add an 'X-Liturgical-Date' header to your outgoing messages to group "somegroup". Disclaimer: some knowledge of posting styles is assumed.

(setq gnus-inhibit-posting-styles nil)
(setq gnus-posting-styles
       '(
   [...]
         ("somegroup"
          ("X-Liturgical-Date" 
           (progn
             (let* ((catholic-info (symbol-value (intern-soft (calendar-catholic-variable-name (rc-current-date)))))
                    (type (cdr (assoc 'type catholic-info)))
                    (name (cdr (assoc 'name catholic-info)))
                    (year (concat "A.D. " (format-time-string "%Y"))))
             (format "%s: %s, %s" type name year))))
          (signature-file "/billw/Mail/.somesig"))
   [...]
))

Thanks

Thanks to:

• Tom McGinnis for advice, suggestions, ideas, bug reports, code. See http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~tfm/romcal/romcal-source.html
• Kenneth G. Bath and his ROMCAL program. See http://www.romcal.net
• Father Scott Archer of St. John the Baptist parish in Fairbury, Illinois (Diocese of Peoria) for pointing me to the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (FSSP) for information relating to the pre-1969 calendar.

Official documentation

• Documents on the Liturgy: 1963-1979. Conciliar, Papal, Curial Texts
  Invaluable!
  
• General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar.
  Complete 1975 version of the document published with the 2nd edition typica, 1975, of the Missale Romanum, with explanatory notes, queries, and replies from Notitiae
  
• Celebratio Baptismatis Domini
  On the transfer of the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord to the Monday after Epiphany.
  
• The Feast of Our Lady of Guadaloupe
  Now a feast in the dioceses of the Americas
  
• The optional memorial of Blessed Damien de Veuster
  Added to the calendars of the United States
• National Calendar for England
• 2000 Calendar for the United States
• 2001 Calendar for the United States

Related links

• Kenneth Bath's romcal
• Romcal extensions by Tom McGinnis
• Bob & Linda Easterbrooks Catholic Calendar page
• Calendrical Calculations: Nachum Dershowitz and Edward M. Reingold
• Calculation of the Ecclesiastical Calendar
• Breviary timeline
• The Extended Liturgical Calendar (for the celebration of Mass in accordance with the Roman Missal of 1962), specifically tailored for the dioceses of England and Wales

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