Friday, April 22, 2011

What if Good Friday and a Feast Day Coincide?

I was doing some research on Good Friday fasting and thought of an interesting question. What would happen if Good Friday (a moveable fast day) and the Feast of the Annunciation (celebrated on March 25) coincided? In other words, Good Friday was on March 25th. Would we feast or fast?

I couldn't seem to come across the answer, so I first went to a website which listed all the dates for Good Friday, Easter, etc. for about a hundred years. Then I searched on Google archives to see if anyone else addressed this issue. And sure enough someone did. Who was it? Well, none other than Jimmy Akin, a frequent guest on Catholic Answers Live and the writer of several books on Catholicism.

The short answer to the question is that in the event that both occur on the same day, interestingly, the Annunciation is pushed back. In the case of 2005 (the most recent time this occurred), it was pushed back to April 4th.

I'm not going to write a better article than Jimmy on this subject, so you can check it out here:

http://www.jimmyakin.org/2005/02/good_annunciati.html

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