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indulterous community.

It requires no more than a brief trawl through a well-furnished memory or a roughly five-minute expenditure of time and its apposite effort to confirm that the substitution of the Solemnity of Mary for the Feast of the Circuмcision postdates both John XXIII's life and the rubrical revision credited to him (or rather, blamed upon him).

The actual 1962 substitution relating to January 1 involves not strictly a change of name from the Feast of the Circuмcision but rather (1) the dropping of that name and (2) the elevation to primary status of the day's quite Traditional but previously secondary title: the Octave Day of the Nativity of Our Lord. The redesignation as Solemnity of Mary might have been applied as soon thereafter as January 1, 1965, or as late as January 1, 1970,* but it emphatically did not happen during John's papacy. (I leave it to others to locate the precise date, as I am otherwise occupied at the moment and do not have access to reliable docuмentary sources, nor can I recall off the top of my head when I first noticed the name change.)

Unless one is a Trad who outright rejects the 1962 changes that Archbishop Lefebvre accepted (albeit with evident reluctance and many misgivings), (1) the presence of the designation Octave Day of the Nativity of Our Lord in and (2) the corresponding absence of Solemnity of Mary from both the Angelus Press Daily Missal and every 1962-rubrics calendar published by the Seraphim Company for the past fifteen years (i.e., as long as I've been buying them) confirm, from a Traditionalist perspective, the legitimacy of the change from the Feast of the Circuмcision to the Octave Day of the Nativity of Our Lord, no matter how undesirable many, myself included, deem that change to be.

And what was the motivation behind the dropped reference to Our Lord's Circuмcision? Those who reflexively resort to mind-reading for an explanation will no doubt judge me "womanish" or "worldly" for preferring evidence to implicit trust in their special skill. One type of evidence is lived history, and as it happens, I have a few bits of that handy. Having been fully alive and alert in the early sixties, I recall quite well that whereas some people were very uncomfortable with talk about circuмcision, Christ's most of all, the discomfort expressed had little or nothing to do with ecuмenism or pluralism, whatever wonders those headings subsume and however misplaced or even dubious the claimed discomfort was. Instead, among the concerns prominently involved were certain proto-feminist ones: for example, what does something done to Our Lord's private parts have to do with His Divinity or our faith and redemption? Even some traditionally oriented people worried that, the spirit of the age being what it was, judaizers within the Church might work to legitimize the old heresy that Catholic men had to be circuмcised because Christ Himself was. This mistaken but by no means unfounded concern came at a time when organized resistance had just begun to most US big-city hospitals' practice of routinely circuмcising all male babies—and I mean routinely, and I mean all! (Apropos which, anyone who thinks that Jєωιѕн power has been a big deal for only the last thirty years doesn't have a clue.)

As for Sean, before the inevitable next instance where he draws poor conclusions from false premises, he might do worse than adopt as his own the long-standing rule of thumb of professional tailors: measure twice, cut once.
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* I was on active duty in Vietnam on January 1, 1968, and although I served Mass—what even then was called the Hybrid Mass—on virtually every Sunday and holyday while I was there, my recollections of feast days and of the rest of the liturgical calendar in place then are poor. Of course, there is a large body of evidence indicating that being shot at on a regular basis can lead to distraction from other matters.