This Sunday is the First Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new liturgical year. Our society has different ways of calculating the timespan of a year. The civic calendar goes form January 1 to December 31. Schools follow the academic calendar, which begins late summer or early autumn and lasts until the spring. The fiscal year starts on July 1 and ends on June 30. A number of ethnic groups also maintain their own traditional calendars.
In the Catholic Church, our calendar is the liturgical year. We start on the First Sunday of Advent, which is the Sunday closest to the Feast of St. Andrew, observed on November 30. We then follow a sequence of seasons and feasts throughout the year, until the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the liturgical year.
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