Ordinary Time of the 2024 Liturgical Calendar is
January 9th through February 13th  (Weeks 1 to 6) and 
May 20th through November 30th  (Weeks 7 to 34)

When is Ordinary Time?

Ordinary Time refers to all of those parts of the Catholic Church's liturgical year that aren't included in the major seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. Ordinary Time thus encompasses two different periods in the Church's calendar, the time after the Christmas season and the time after the Easter season.

The Church year begins with Advent, followed immediately by the Christmas season. Ordinary Time begins on the Monday after the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which is the end of the Christmas Season. This first period of Ordinary Time runs until Ash Wednesday when the liturgical season of Lent begins. Both Lent and the Easter season fall outside of Ordinary Time, which resumes again on the Monday after Pentecost Sunday, the end of the Easter season. This second period of Ordinary Time runs until the First Sunday of Advent when the liturgical year begins again.

Not So "Ordinary"

Because the term ordinary in English most often means something that's not special or distinctive, many people think that Ordinary Time refers to parts of the calendar of the Catholic Church that are unimportant. Even though the season of Ordinary Time makes up most of the liturgical year in the Catholic Church, the fact that Ordinary Time refers to those periods that fall outside of the major liturgical seasons reinforces this impression. Yet Ordinary Time is far from unimportant or uninteresting.

Ordinary Time is called "ordinary" not because it is common, but simply because the weeks of Ordinary Time are numbered. The Latin word ordinalis, which refers to numbers in a series, stems from the Latin word ordo, from which we get the English word order. Thus, the numbered weeks of Ordinary Time, in fact, represent the ordered life of the Church—the period in which we live our lives neither in feasting (as in the Christmas and Easter seasons) or in more severe penance (as in Advent and Lent), but in watchfulness and expectation of the Second Coming of Christ.

For Catholics, Ordinary Time is the part of the year in which Christ, the Lamb of God, walks among us and transforms our lives.