For fifteen hundred years, the Catholic liturgical year was not a museum piece but a way of life. It organized the calendar, the table, the household, the soul. The Advent wreath in the darkened kitchen. The Rorate Mass before dawn. The May altar crowned with flowers. The black vestments and Dies Irae of the Requiem. Then, in less than two decades, most of it disappeared from ordinary parish life.

Before the Altar Changed, Vol. I: The Liturgical Year is a recovery — not a polemic. Drawing on Dom Guéranger, Pius Parsch, Francis X. Weiser, and the lived practice of pre-Vatican II Catholic households, Ken Craig-Saunders walks the reader through every season of the traditional Roman calendar: Advent, Christmastide, Septuagesima, Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide, the Marian months, Corpus Christi, Ordinary Time, October's Rosary, November's Holy Souls. Each season is given its history, its theology, and a practical "How to Observe" guide that any Catholic household can take up today.

This is the first volume in the Before the Altar Changed series, written for two readers: the Catholic born after 1965 who never inherited the older devotional culture, and the Catholic born before 1965 who remembers it and wants to pass it on. Whether you attend the Traditional Latin Mass, the Ordinary Form, or have not been to Mass in years, the practices in this book are available to you. They were never the property of a religious elite. They belonged to farmers and shopkeepers and schoolchildren, and they belong to you.

Includes 52 illustrations, five appendices (the traditional liturgical calendar, the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, common prayers of the pre-Vatican II Church, and a guide to recommended resources), and chapter-by-chapter scholarly notes.