Each month of the liturgical year is devoted to a particular Catholic tradition.
Why do we have Monthly devotions? Just like the mysteries in our Rosary, monthly devotions help us to express our love and our devotion to Jesus and they also help us in the same way as the Rosary mysteries to meditate on the scriptures and while we pray.
As the earth cycles annually through its seasons, just so the Church celebrates with quiet, deliberate rhythm the seasons of the liturgical year – always the same, yet ever new and renewing.
At the heart of this yearly cycle is the Sacred Liturgy, especially the celebration of the Mass, which is the source and summit of the Church's life.
Annually, through the Proper of Seasons or Temporal Cycle,
the Church immerses herself in the whole “mystery of Christ, from the incarnation
and birth until the ascension, the day of Pentecost, and the expectation of blessed hope
and of the coming of the Lord.” Further, in the
Proper of Saints or Sanctoral Cycle, she honors with special love
Mary, the Mother of God, and celebrates the feasts of martyrs and
saints who are already in possession of eternal salvation.
Through her official public worship the Church recalls and
celebrates these mysteries, dispensing to her members
the treasure of Christ’s merits for their sanctification. This “universal call to holiness”, our sanctification,
is the will of God for each of us who have by Baptism been grafted onto
the Vine that is Christ and his Mystical Body. It is God who accomplishes the work of our sanctification through the
liturgy, especially the Eucharistic sacrifice.
