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The first Sunday after
Pentecost, instituted to honor the Most Holy Trinity. In the early Church
no special Office or day was assigned for the Holy Trinity. When the Arian
heresy was spreading the Fathers prepared an Office with canticles,
responses, a Preface, and hymns, to be recited on Sundays. In the
Sacramentary of St. Gregory the Great (P.L., LXXVIII, 116) there are
prayers and the Preface of the Trinity. The Micrologies (P.L., CLI, 1020),
written during the pontificate of Gregory VII (Nilles, II, 460), call the
Sunda after Pentecost a Dominica vacans, with no special Office, but add
that in some places they recited the Office of the Holy Trinity composed
by Bishop Stephen or Liège (903-20) By other the Office was said on the
Sunday before Advent. Alexander II (1061-1073), not III (Nilles, 1. c.),
refused a petition for a special feast on the plea, that such a feast was
not customary in the Roman Church which daily honored the Holy Trinity by
the Gloria, Patri, etc., but he did not forbid the celebration where it
already existed. John XXII (1316-1334) ordered the feast for the entire
Church on the first Sunday after Pentecost. A new Office had been made by
the Franciscan John Peckham, Canon of Lyons, later Archbishop of
Canterbury (d. 1292). The feast ranked as a double of the second class but
was raised to the dignity of a primary of the first class, 24 July 1911,
by Pius X (Acta Ap. Sedis, III, 351). The Greeks have no special feast.
Since it was after the first great Pentecost that the doctrine of the
Trinity was proclaimed to the world, the feast becomingly follows that of
Pentecost.
sources:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15058a.htm
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