As I become more knowledgeable about the 1954 calendar and the Pius X missal, the more the 1962 missal bothers me.

The suppression of nearly all octaves during the liturgical year are specially irritating when your start to think of how rich and edifying it was to spend eight days meditating on some major feast, instead of only one.

The excerpt below is from an article by Dr. Carol Byrne found of the TIA website:

https://www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/f155_Dialogue_72.htm

Abolishing 15 out of 18 Octaves of Feasts

Dr. Carol Byrne, Great Britain

If Vigils were treated badly under Pius XII, Octaves fared even worse. In fact, they were specifically mentioned as one of the first items targeted by the 1948 Commission for excision from the liturgy in the interests of “simplification.” (1)

Of the 18 Octaves in use in the Tridentine Missal, (2) only 3 – those of Christmas, Easter and Pentecost – survived the 1956 reform. The Feasts deprived of their Octaves were:

• Epiphany;
• Nativity of St John the Baptist;
• SS. Peter & Paul;
• St. Lawrence
• Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary;
• Nativity of Our Lady;
• All Saints;
• Immaculate Conception;
• St. Stephen;
• St. John the Evangelist;
• Holy Innocents;
• Solemnity of St Joseph;
• Ascension;
• Corpus Christi;
• Sacred Heart.

It is obvious from this list that Octaves were a key mainstay of the Liturgical Year throughout its different Seasons. While Vigils had the function of preparing the faithful for the Church’s great festivals and helping them to participate more effectively in them, Octaves functioned by allowing room or breathing space for the “special graces” of each Season to be assimilated and applied to their everyday lives. Without these practical aids to the spiritual life, the Church’s Feasts are more likely to be treated as transient occurrences with little expectation of long-term effects.

What reason, then, did Pius XII’s Commission give for the demolition of so many pillars of the lex orandi whose removal would make the whole structure of the Liturgical Year unsafe and unstable?

The official reason was the old chestnut of “simplification,” to prevent Octaves from overlapping other Feasts. But the Church already had tried and tested methods for dealing with this eventuality, which did not involve abolishing Octaves. (3)

The real reason, expressed by the Commission members in their “Memo,” was to have the Liturgy “freed from certain accretions, which obscure its beauty and diminish in a certain sense its efficacy.” (4) That was one way of saying that the growth of Octaves was a useless and unwanted addition and an ugly excrescence on the face of the Roman Rite.

The linked article omits some further octaves that were excised:

Each consecrated parish church had an octave for both its Titular and its Dedication;
Each parish also observed octaves for the Titular and Dedication of the Cathedral of the Diocese;
Churches observed the feast of Patrons - be they of a country, and/or place e.g. a city, with an octave;
Religious kept octaves for their founders.