St Joachim’s Travels

Fr Hunwicke muses on the vicissitudes of St Joachim’s Feast Day and its moves from the Deformation period until St Pius X's Reforms.

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment

 So is today the Festival of S Joachim, Father of the Theotokos? 

Well, Yes, er, and, er, No. I offer here a broad canvas to those who like their amusements liturgical.

SS Anna and Joachim suffered during the Counter-Reformation. Being 'unbiblical', they did a bunk to prevent the proddies claiming that the Catholic Church was mired in superstitious legends. Silly, in my view: after all, our blessed Lady did have parents, so I can't see any problem in affixing honorary names to them. 

But, in any case, they were allowed back in by Gregory XV in 1622.

S Joachim really takes off in 1738, when he was placed on the Sunday within the Octave of the Assumption as a Greater Double. He stayed there from 1738 until 1913. More than a century and a half. And this was the great period of baroque liturgical magnificence and assertion. When Benedict XIV, most learned pontiff in more than half a millennium, paused his dictation and picked up his Breviary, S Joachim was there on that Sunday. As the Church battled with Revolution and Buonaparte, S Joachim lent a hand as the Papal states were regained and then relost. Throughout the long pontificate of Pio Nono, the Latin clergy celebrated S Joachim on the Sunday after his Daughter's Assumption. He was lurking in Nicolas Wiseman's Breviary as his Eminence composed and sent forth his letter from the Flaminian Gate. S John Henry Newman, admirer from his Anglican days of the Roman Breviary, had Joachim in his coat pocket as he preached on the Second Spring. As the Oratory Church rose from the ground in Brompton, Father Faber never knew a form of the Divine Office in which S Joachim did not occupy the Sunday within the Octave. And Dom Gueranger ...

And the Fathers of Vatican I took him into the Conciliar aula as the skies thundered and they so wisely and presciently voted that the Roman Pontiff has no authority to invent new doctrines. The days when S Joachim was observed throughout the West on the Sunday after August 15 included those great formative decades of the modern Catholic Church and of the renewed English Catholic Church. Within that period, popes as well as priests and people were born, lived their entire Christian lives, and died. 

I wonder how widely and deeply the cult of S Joachim reached. Pope Leo XIII, who finally sent the galero to S John Henry, had Joachim as a baptismal name, and, in 1879, raised the Saint's Festival to the rank of a Double of the Second Class.

This was no mean period of Catholic life and liturgy: it still demands our respect. It came to an end in 1913, when the excellent motive of rescuing the use of the old Roman Sunday Masses led to S Joachim moving to August 16.

But a relic remained of the older customs. Those were times when clergy rather felt that warmly to encourage their people for decades to do X, Y, or Z ... and then, overnight, to ban it ('before breakfast tomorrow morning') ... was a Bit Off. 

So, if you consult your St Lawrence ORDO, you will find that, although S Joachim does rest upon August 16, there is a gentle and understanding note permitting, on the Sunday within the Octave of the Assumption, one Mass that day of S Joachim.

Civilised days.