Liturgical Colour

This Python module will return the name, season, week number and liturgical colour for any day in the Gregorian calendar, according to the Anglican tradition of the Church of England.

This module's algorithm is a direct port to Python of DateTime::Calendar::Liturgical::Christian, which was originally written in Perl and loaded with the calendar of the Episcopal Church of the USA. It has now been fed with data from the Church of England's Calendar of saints and substantially modified to suit the Anglican calendar.

The output of this module is compared against the Church of England Lectionary, which is taken to be the canonical source.

Background

Some churches use a special church calendar. Days and seasons within the year may be either "fasts" (solemn times) or "feasts" (joyful times). The year is structured around the greatest feast in the calendar, the festival of the Resurrection of Jesus, known as Easter, and the second greatest feast, the festival of the Nativity of Jesus, known as Christmas. Before Christmas and Easter there are solemn fast seasons known as Advent and Lent respectively. After Christmas comes the feast of Epiphany, and after Easter comes the feast of Pentecost. These days have the adjacent seasons named after them.

The church's new year falls on Advent Sunday, which occurs around the start of December. Then follows the four-week fast season of Advent, then comes the Christmas season, which lasts twelve days; then comes Epiphany, then the forty days of Lent. Then comes Easter, then the long season of Pentecost (which some churches call Trinity, after the feast which falls soon after Pentecost). Then the next year begins and we return to Advent again.

Along with all these, the church remembers the women and men who have made a positive difference in church history by designating feast days for them, usually on the anniversary of their death. For example, we remember St. Andrew on the 30th day of November in the Western churches. Every Sunday is the feast day of Jesus, and if it has no other name is numbered according to the season in which it falls. So, for example, the third Sunday in Pentecost season would be called Pentecost 3.

Seasons are traditionally assigned colours, which are used for clothing and other materials. The major feasts are coloured white or gold. Fasts are purple. Feasts for martyrs (people who died for their faith) are red. Other days are green.

Installation

pip install liturgical-colour

Usage, as a command

Once installed, this can be run at the command line. Currently it prints an object with various attributes. This portion of the module needs improvement, although it is probably more useful as a library.

Specify the date in YYYY-MM-DD format, or leave blank to return info for today.

# Get info for today
$ liturgical_colour
name : 
prec : 1
season : Advent
weekno : 4
date : 2023-12-21
colour : purple
colourcode : #ad099a

# Get info for an arbitrary date
$ liturgical_colour 2023-01-25
name : The Conversion of Paul
url : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_of_Paul
prec : 7
type : Festival
season : Epiphany
weekno : 3
date : 2023-01-25
colour : white
colourcode : #ffffff

Usage, as a library

# Get info for today
dayinfo = liturgical_colour()

# Get info for an arbitrary date
# Date can be expressed as a string in YYYY-MM-DD format, a Datetime object, or a Date object
dayinfo = liturgical_colour('YYYY-MM-DD')

# Access the attributes individually
print(dayinfo['colour'])

Issues

If you find bugs (either in the code or in the calendar), please create an issue on GitHub.

Pull requests are always welcome, either to address bugs or add new features.

Example

There is a sample app which uses this library called Liturgical Colour App.