What this calendar is, and what it is not

A calendar of saints can mean very different things, and it is fair to want to know which one this is before you use it. So, plainly: this calendar is a list of days on which the Church gives thanks to God for particular people, reads something of their lives, and asks God for the same grace that was at work in them. Prayer is offered to God. It is not offered to the saints.

That is not a modern softening. It is where the English Reformation landed and where Anglicanism has stayed. The Thirty-Nine Articles are direct about it:

The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.

The reformers cut invocation and kept commemoration, and they kept it deliberately rather than by inertia. Remembering the dead in Christ, giving thanks for them, and learning from how they lived is not a concession to anybody. It is what Hebrews does for four chapters. The rest of this page is about how the resulting calendar took the shape it has.

Learning the doctrine that held them

Hebrews does not stop at admiration. A chapter later it gives an instruction, and the instruction is specific about method.

Remember your leaders who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Consider the outcome, then imitate the faith. The order matters. You are meant to look at how a life actually turned out, over its whole length, and then to copy the thing that produced that outcome. And the reason this works across sixteen centuries and several continents is given in the next breath: the Lord they trusted has not changed.

This is why the saint pages here spend as much time on what a person believed as on what happened to them. Athanasius is not interesting because he was exiled five times. He is interesting because of what he would not surrender in order to stop being exiled, and it is worth knowing exactly what that was. Cranmer’s death is unbearable to read without knowing what he had recanted and then unrecanted, and why. Perpetua’s prison diary is a young mother reasoning about her own death out of doctrine she had been taught. Take the doctrine out of these lives and what is left is either sentiment or horror. The doctrine is what made ordinary people able to live and die like that, and it is available to you on the same terms.

How the calendar came to be

The practice began at graves. Local churches kept the anniversary of a martyr’s death, often gathering where the body was buried, and read the account of how they died. It was congregational memory before it was anything institutional: this happened here, to one of ours, and we are not going to forget it. Those local lists grew, were copied, were exchanged between churches, and by the later Middle Ages the calendar had accumulated for a thousand years without anyone ever being responsible for the total.

The result was crowded, and unevenly sourced. Some commemorations rested on early and reliable accounts. Others rested on late legends that had grown in the retelling, and a few rested on nothing that a careful reader could find. By the eve of the Reformation the English calendars carried enough observances that the ordinary weekday pattern of Scripture reading was regularly interrupted.

What the reformers pruned

Cranmer’s complaint in 1549 was not primarily that there were saints in the calendar. It was that the calendar had swallowed the Bible. The daily office he built was designed to read Scripture straight through, and a saint’s day with its own readings breaks the sequence. Where days had multiplied, the sequence had effectively stopped.

So the first Book of Common Prayer cut hard. What survived was a short list, almost entirely biblical: the apostles, the evangelists, and a handful of feasts of the Lord and of the New Testament. These are the red-letter days, so called because printers set them in red ink. They kept proper collects and proper readings, and they still do.

What happened next is the part usually left out. Within a dozen years the calendar began to fill back in. The 1561 revision restored a long list of commemorations, and later prayer books kept them: Alban and Bede, Augustine and Jerome, Lucy and Agnes, names from the ancient church and from English soil. They came back in a different key. They are black-letter days, carrying no proper collect or lessons of their own, so the daily reading of Scripture runs on undisturbed. The reformers had not decided that Christian memory was dangerous. They had decided that it must not displace the Word, and once that was structurally secured, the memory could return.

A tradition that kept growing

A medieval calendar is a closed thing, and this one is not. The Anglican calendar has continued to receive names for four centuries after the Middle Ages ended, which is the most distinctive fact about it. Seventeenth-century pastors and poets are here. So are the missionaries and translators of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Wesleys, and Christians of the twentieth century who died under regimes that no medieval compiler could have imagined. The calendar in this app follows the Book of Common Prayer 2019, and it includes teachers and reformers whom a fifteenth-century list would never have held.

This is not the calendar loosening its standards. It is the calendar behaving consistently. If the reason to remember Polycarp is that he held to Christ under pressure and his life is evidence for us, then the same reason applies to a bishop killed in the twentieth century for the same confession. The cloud in Hebrews 11 was still gathering when the letter was written. There is no year in which it stopped.

How to use it

You do not need to do anything special. The calendar simply marks the day, and if a commemoration falls today it will appear in the daily office alongside the readings. You can read the saint’s page or ignore it; the office does not depend on it.

The pages themselves are written in two voices, on purpose. The story is told the way the Church has always told it, including the parts that later scholarship cannot confirm, because the telling is the inheritance and it deserves to be heard whole. The history is then set out with its sources named, its distances from the events stated, and the thin places identified as thin. Reverence and honesty are not opposed here. You are trusted with both.

Read them as Hebrews suggests. Consider the outcome of their way of life. Imitate their faith. And keep your eyes where the passage puts them, on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who is the same yesterday and today and forever.