Pope Francis instituted The Sunday of the Word of God to be held every year on the third Sunday of Ordinary Time, with the Apostolic Letter in the form of a Motu proprio Aperuit illis issued on 30 September 2019.
The Pope intended it to be a day dedicated to the celebration, reflection and dissemination of the Word.
Importance of Sacred Scripture in our lives
A note released on Saturday by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and signed by the prefect, Cardinal Robert Sarah, explains that The Sunday of the Word of God is a means to help people “reawaken an awareness of the importance of Sacred Scripture for our lives as believers, beginning with its resonance in the liturgy which places us in living and permanent dialogue with God.”
CDW Note on the Sunday of the Word of God
This comes more than a year after Pope Francis published
Aperuit Illis, a motu proprio instituting the Sunday of the Word of God. There was some commentary here on PrayTell on this new observance at that time and at the time of its first observance, at the start of 2020, I published a piece on “almost obligatory” Irish contribution to the observance.
This new Note is to be welcomed, although one might wonder why it took fourteen months to be published after
Aperuit Illis. Rather than providing liturgical texts or changes to the rubrics, helps parishes to mark the observance without changing the existing liturgical texts. At the end of the document, it explains that “the purpose of this Note is to help reawaken, in the light of the Sunday of the Word of God, an awareness of the importance of Sacred Scripture for our lives as believers”.